To Beard or Not to Beard

Names Please: We went to a wedding this past weekend. I was incredibly amused by the name card. 

 Decorate In Season: I usually prefer my weddings to be solemn, reverent affairs, but I let it all go this time and just went with the lighthearted nature of the event. The hall was decorated with spiderwebs, scarecrows, gourds, and even some tombstones.  The centerpieces were lovely flowers inside sparkly pumpkin buckets. I loved it all.  (Maybe I raised an eyebrow at the bride and groom recessing to the theme from Star Wars, but you would, too. Don't lie.)

Don't Hate on the Beards:  Apparently there's a big event going on right now in the world of baseball.  It's called the World Series. And I guess there's a team called the Boston Red Sox who are playing in it and there are some players on that team who have grown out beards and they're getting some flak about it.

Some guy named Roger Angell wrote in The New Yorker: Can I ask a question? Where are the Red Sox wives or sweetie pies in all this? Have none of them spoken up—privately or in the Globe or in a thousand tweets—to protest this office fad? How does it feel to wake up, night after night, in immediate proximity to a crazed Pomeranian or a Malamute or an Old English sheepdog stubbornly adhering to the once caressable jaw of the guy on the nearest pillow? Doesn’t it scratch? Doesn’t it itch? Doesn’t it smell, however faintly, of tonight’s boeuf en daube or yesterday’s last pinch of Red Man?

Let me answer for you, Mr. Angell.  My husband has a beard. He usually keeps it well groomed (see below).  He goes to a hipster hair cutting place and gets his hair cut and his beard trimmed and he spends more time every morning trimming his beard and mustache than he does when he shaves it all off.   I do not speak up, privately or in public, for my husband to remove his beard because I love it.  It does not scratch or itch. As a matter of fact, it is incredibly soft. It is much better than the five o'clock shadow I was forced to perpetually live with when my husband was clean shaven. Stubble hurts,yo!

Also, let's be honest here. My husband uses beard oil to condition his beard and the skin underneath his beard.  The beard oil he uses (Burroughs Beard Oil from Prospector Co.) smells delightful. I frequently lean over to him and just put my nose in his beard. I know you're jealous because my husband won't let YOU do that, but I assure you, there is no smell but wonderfulness in his beard.

I get that not all ladies love the beards. And that's fine with me.  You don't have to like it.  But you also don't have to hate on it.  Because even when my husband's beard is not well groomed and it's crazy like a mountain man's, it is absolutely sexy to me.  So don't spread false lies about beards - they don't itch or smell.  You can have aesthetic preferences, of course, but you don't need to be spreading falsehoods.

I think someone actually took a picture of the two of us, but I'm not sure. It's possible this is the only picture of the two of us looking like sexy bitches on our way out the door.

Wrong Holiday: My Christmas cactus has decided to bloom now.  Once it bloomed on Easter. It's SO CONFUSED.

What's Zelda Doing: Twenty minutes ago when I started this, she was sleeping adorably.  Now she is running around like a lunatic from the bathroom to the couch and back again. In another twenty minutes, she'll be asleep again.