My Reusable Christmas List

I’ve seen a lot of changes of the Christmas holiday through the years and some things that never change. Every year people still complain about the lack of religion in the holiday but this is the first year I’ve heard of a mall offering “Selfies with Santa”.

Santa has never thought me a good enough boy to get everything I wanted even though I’ve been using the same Christmas list for over a half century. Granted the meanings of the items have changed over the years but I think its still the same basic list. I’ll let you decide. Old pictures are on the left, updated list items on the right. […]

The Big Holiday is Finally Over

The first and most used of the Let’s-Get-The-Family-Together holidays is over. In our case it was fairly painless as most of the family has moved to warmer climates. And they filled me with envy when I looked out the window and saw eight inches of ‘White Christmas’ covering everything Christmas Eve. But we still have enough family nearby to easily fill a living room.

I never complain too loudly about any family get-together because the house does get totally cleaned. I’ve never really understood the reason for house cleaning solely as part of a special occasion. It’s not like anyone would have a problem with our day-to-day lifestyle during a visit. We don’t dress up especially to visit family so I guess we dress up the house instead.

And another thing the bugs me about holidays is why it seems we need to use them as a reason to go see family. During the visit you can count on someone saying, “It’s been too long.” or “My how you’ve grown.” Jeez, people you only live five or ten miles away. It’s not like any one still has to hitch up the horses to the sleigh to get over here. Make a tradition of breaking tradition and visit on a regular basis.

The best part of this holiday being over is being able to watch TV and not seeing commercials with some car dealer forcing their kids to say “Have a Merry Christmas” in unison in an attempt to endear us enough to go in buy a car from them. “Hey Frank Ford, get your kids off my lawn!”

That’s only a partial list of why I’m glad the holidays are over. I’m sure I could complain some more but I try not to do that with my mouth full. So I’m gonna go now and have some more leftovers.

A Simple Equation For Life

Being sometimes a little over-analytical I’ve noticed how many things in life can be broken down into math equations. This came to me as I was sipping my coffee on a beautiful summer morning last Saturday, trying to decide what really needed to get done that day. I didn’t feel like doing much. Actually I had absolutely no desire to do anything. I knew Snowball would ask later for a reason why nothing was getting done, so I came up with a simple equation for motivation. Too bad she wouldn’t care about the equation and just tell me to get off my butt. […]