We had a splendid Thanksgiving day yesterday. I kept busy roasting a turkey, making sausage, sage, and onion dressing, mashing potatos, stiriring gravy, and baking an apple pie. We were supposed to have peas, but as usual I was so focused on the complicated dance of timing with the other things that I left out the fresh vegetables. I will have a salad a day for the rest of my vacation to make up for it, along with the leftovers. Mmm.

I also did several loads of laundry, read a short book, and watched three episodes of Buffy so I felt like I'd squeezed a whole weekend into one day. I failed to read my history or practice piano, but I knew that would happen. The book was one of the Narnia Chronicles, The Horse and His Boy. I was taken aback to discover the enchanting inhabitants of Calormene with their poetic way of speaking and their exotic silk clothes which I remember loving as a child are in fact quite obviously sinister infidel Middle Easterners, enemies of Christianity (excuse me, Narnia) and all right-thinking beings. It rather upset me. I hate when children's books turn out to have blatant adult agendas. This spoils everything. Perhaps it shouldn't but it does.

These books are carefully inscribed with my name and the words Christmas 1974, the last time I read them, my junior year of high school. I could still find pleasure in them then, I didn't have any political savvy or a trace of cynicism in my soul. I wasn't sophisticated about the world. Now I can only think of what stereotypes Lewis is perpetuating, and wonder when I lost the ability to appreciate the books. Because I don't. They're artifacts of another time and place, embued with an attitude I find appalling, and the magic has gone out of them.

Sometimes I get the magic back after rereading a childhood favorite as an adult and going through a period of disenchantment. But that's mostly from my university days when I first discovered fantasy writers didn't create worlds out of whole cloth but rather wove strands of mythology, history, urban legend, current events, prejudices, inclinations, and inspiration into a story, then tied it off with personal style. It was jarring to realize how much J.R.R. Tolkien had borrrowed, as it were, from the Norse sagas and the Finnish Kalevala. I had wholeheartedly believed he made it all up in his head; naive, but I really believed it. The disillusionment was as ashes in my mouth, much like discovering your beloved has been cheating on you. But I got over it. Tolkien did so much more than borrow that I learned to love his books again.

I don't think I'll get over my disaffection with Narnia. It is actually offensive to me, the Christian analogies too obvious, the morals too heavy handed. I can't see beyond them any more. I see the Greatness of the English Empire and White Superiority and Manifest Destiny instead of talking horses and plucky princesses. The stories have been reduced to two dimensions.

Oh, it's too depressing. Let's talk about something else. There was a Thanksgiving Day Buffy Marathon on FX so I finally saw three episodes that I'd missed: "The Wish", "Doppelgangland", and "Buffy vs. Dracula". Very, very good episodes. Now I believe I am completely caught up except for the remainder of Season 5 (last week was "Forever", the episode following "The Body", and it tore me up so much I demanded we watch something cheerful immediately. It took me twenty minutes to stop feeling upset. That is some of the best television I have ever seen).

What else? I located my favorite Japanese Sims creators, Michelle and Kyoen, who had closed down their old site for reasons unknown before I could download everything. I happened across the new site by randomly visiting a series of affiliate links on sites, clicking through four and five layers of links until suddenly I recognised their initials in the title: BNJ + LVR for Barairo No Jinsei and La Vie En Rose. I am so happy they are still online. And the Sims Goddesses have turned up as collaborators at SimFreaks. Yay! They do the best clothes ever.

Yes, I am a big Sims geek. If you are not really sure why people love the Sims, there was an article in the New York Times last Sunday that did a pretty good job of explaining why it's such a fantastically popular game. David Brooks talks mainly about the Sims Online, now in beta testing, but he gets to the heart of why any version of the game is addictive. He finds it a little weird and obsessive, wondering if maybe the folks who spend so much time online creating little Sims soap operas and changing everyone's clothes all the time might do better to get some fresh air and a real life.

He goes on to say, "But the other and more positive sensation you get in Sims world is that some mass creative process is going on, like the writing of a joint novel with millions of collaborative and competitive authors. We generally don't think that John Updike or Saul Bellow or Cynthia Ozick are pathetic because they escape from reality into richly populated fantasy worlds. We regard that process of creativity as something that enriches a life and yields deeper understandings about the real world. And the Sims players are doing something like that at their keyboards. The game is a superstructure for fantasy."

Just so.

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