xmas feast

We had a salad spinner. I thought it was old and decrepit. It was really quite up to date. What is there about a salad spinner that makes it up to date, you ask? Well, it is hard to describe

Salad spinners spin, pure and simple; they describe a circular orbit about their axis and spin, thus accelerating the water droplets upon the lettuce to a speed at which they fly off the lettuce and disappear into the stratosphere.
This particular salad spinner, however, was something else. As I used its witchery, it came back to me why we had hidden it far away from mankind in the first place.

To be quite plain, the spinner spun so fast that everything became relativistic. There were quantum effects galore, entangled atoms of romaine shedding their water here on Earth by Sol and somewhere on Planet KS243 in Vega. Beyond this, since the "brake" ( relativistic brake, actually) choose this particular time not to function, there was sort of an exponential acceleration on to and beyond the bloody speed of light.
What I took to be a functional thing-a-ma-jig made from plastic and designed for spinning of the most rudimentary type apparently slipped the bonds of space and time, as it were, and turned into a Spinner of Salad with ruby dials and tourmaline levers, blinking in an alien code before my unbelieving eyes. I stood dumfounded and stared into the maelstrom of salad; a German scientist appeared out of the quantum foam next to me, muttering "Fritzchen freudich...morgen gibt's Sellerie Salat...".

The leaves of romaine begin to shift before me, growing radices and branches, stretching to heaven and hades, thickening and becoming bark-like...ent-like,epidermal and living I suppose. Then, after 100 million years had passed according to the turquoise chronometer on the side of the Spinner 2000, I saw consciousness appear. It was alive! Alive! Igor threw the dressing about wildly.
The salad looked at me...and spoke not a word. Then the Moorlocks came through the spinner slits, creeping like an insidious grease into the central sanctum.

Long story short, we did not have salad for Xmas. It had been time-line shifted and went somewhere else in the ESPY, hopefully to someone who did not already have a salad. I turned to the meat. I laid the tenderloin out on the meat cutting block. It had valleys in it for liquid flow, wadis for blood, if you will, dry for most of the year, yet filled to overflowing on the days of festivities celebrated by the meats of animals who died in cruel incomprehension, forming a drainage basin for blood which flowed to a central lacustrine locus which in my mind I called The Sea of Blood and imagined things of piracy.

I stood in festal ceremonious unctuousness as if I were a Mayan Medical Examiner with a new batch of prisoners of war, knife in my hand, on the balls of my toes, ready to...do whatever it was that Mayan - or Aztec - Medical Examiners used to do at times like these. Everything began to look like one of the less cheery stage sets for "Event Horizon". I murmured like CSI: Port Desespoir: "...The victim was apparently killed by a blow to the head by a blunt instrument... then cut up and baked in a oven at 385 degrees for 6.5 minutes per pound... " But the solstice is a time to remember those who have gone from us as well as to look forward to the return of the sun. I put down the knife and swore never to eat meat again.