Mele kalaeikimaka

Mele kaleikimaka is the thing to say
On a bright Hawaiian Christmas Day
That's the island greeting that we send to you
From the land where palm trees sway
Here we know that Christmas will be green and bright
The sun will shine by day and all the stars at night
Mele kaleikimaka is Hawaii's way
To say "Merry Christmas" to you!

Years ago, I saw the late Warren Zevon with a devilishly cute girl named Mary Christner... I to this day think of her as "Merry Christmas."

She and I had grown up in the same town in western New York but had never met... when I later lived in Rochester, she and I ran into each other at a holiday party hosted by the topmost tenants in the house where I had an apartment. She and I went to lunch once in Rochester, which is a pretty damn windy town, and she was wearing a black wrap skirt over white nylons and heels, and she did a great Marilyn Monroe when her skirt blew open to the four winds.

She and I caught up with each other two or three years later, when we were both working in New Jersey -- she as a buyer for Macy's and me as a tech guy for AT&T's lame-ass efforts to have a presence in the nascent personal computer market in 1986. She had hardened, become distant.

She was damn cute.

Damn cute.