NaNoWriMo done; what's next?

I forgot to post this when I wrote it last night.  Here it is.  The Christmas song rant at the end is new, though.

I still am here, finding my feet in the outskirts of Washington D.C.  It's the middle of December and yesterday we couldn't seem to get the air conditioning to turn off.  It turned out that was actually the furnace, doing everything it was supposed to do except create heat.  This will be remedied forthwith, our exceedingly kind landlord, assures us, but that is the adventure of the day: space heaters and exploratory wall surgery.

Back in Seattle, après moi, le déluge.  This week the last of us will be moving out of the old house.  To my not insubstantial surprise, the weirdness of this was alleviated by a music video slideshow that Katie put together of the various housemates from the past 5 (!) years.

Oh, I completed NaNoWriMo!  I won't claim that I won this year, because I passed 50,000 words on December 8, one day after my self-extended deadline.  That will be the first year I've fallen short since I started taking it seriously, which is disappointing, I think I may have moved to another level along the way.  When I first embarked on that journey, I figured that this was something I had to do to prove to myself that I could be a writer.  This year, as I found myself becoming frustrated with my prolonged novelling sprint cutting into time I could be spending on Hengist, or Nenle and Death, or one of several unnamed short stories, it occurred to me that November was no longer the battleground of my self-actualization.

I've been hanging around the writers' forum at Cracked.com for a while, biding my time.  This is another thing that got put off for the duration of November.  It's about time, for me to have some funny ideas now, and if any of them get picked up, you'll know.  You'll so know.

Meanwhile, it's Christmas time.  On Saturday Girlfriend and I rearranged furniture to make room for the tree that we will take in from the cold this month, in the spirit of holiday charity.  (That, by the way, is a terrible image to follow to its logical conclusions.  Don't.)  There's a lot of enthusiastic decorating in this neighborhood, but so far I haven't seen any of those awful inflatables that started springing up like festive fungus back while I was in college.  (Random scary note: I was going to write "a few years ago" but then I actually counted.)

Another way the times are a-changing, though not too fast: Christmas music.  xkcd made an interesting point about our holiday radio play: our "classic" holiday songs (as opposed to our "traditional" ones, I might parse) overwhelmingly come out of the Baby Boom years.  I'm tempted to speculate on how much of the cause and effect might be the opposite--did postwar prosperity spur interest in commercial Christmas and, consequently, Christmas songs, as much as Boomers' nostalgia for the songs of their childhood carried those songs forward?  I guess the question is how many Christmas songs come out now, compared to then.  Dare we speak of relative quality?  I don't know where to begin to address this question rigorously, but a quick search  and personal experience suggests that holiday songs written after 1970 are categorically insufferable.  But then, I was thinking to myself on Saturday how tedious some of the upbeat Christmas novelty standards are, and we have the Boomers to blame for keeping them on the radio while the dross of my own childhood is allowed to mercifully vanish.  Perhaps the most charitable thesis I can settle on is that I can hate almost anything.

These last two paragraphs were originally intended to be a brief segue into this question: When did "A Few of My Favorite Things" become a Christmas song?  I heard at least two versions of it in the same mix over the course of dinner on Saturday.  It kept bringing to mind images of Julie Andrews frolicking through verdant countryside.  Has the song just been severed from its source at this point?