Voodoo Time Dot Com

‘Tis the day before Christmas
And all through our flat
Not a damned thing is ready
What’s up with that?

Boy did Christmas ever sneak up on me this year. We barely have our tree up. Until this week, it’s seemed like Christmas was still a month away. I am so not ready for this.

Most years (this one included), I am so buried in work and day-to-day minutiae that I feel like I’ve hardly digested Thanksgiving dinner by the time Christmas comes around. The whole thing rolls right past me, and despite my best efforts to the contrary, I find myself standing in an enormous line somewhere on Christmas Eve, angry for the half hour of my life I just wasted trolling for a parking spot.

In my adulthood, I’m becoming jaded with Christmas - or “giftmas” as I’ve taken to calling it. It hardly seems worth the trouble; trading greeting cards by mail that no one really wants to write, worrying about what to buy people, the stories of parents fighting other parents for this year’s “gotta have” toy… I’m not saying I don’t enjoy giving gifts (quite the contrary) but it seems that more and more, we’re all just going through the motions. Christmas is supposed to be about peace, but there’s never a moment’s peace for most of us this time of year.

At this time last year, I had been unemployed for two months. We were draining our savings and racking up credit card debt just to pay the bills. We were about four to six weeks from completely broke. It sucked. Needless to say, there were not many Christmas gifts. But for probably the first time in my adult life, I noticed the cool evenings, the lights going up on houses, and the carols on the radio. And there were no last-minute trips to the mall to sour my love for humankind. My wife and I spent several evenings just driving around the neighborhoods looking at light displays, and drinking hot cocoa. The night we drove around lost in the hills with the rain pouring down is the greatest Christmas memory I have since childhood.

It came without ribbons! It came without tags!
It came without packages, boxes or bags!

Next year - don’t buy me anything. Spend that time going for a drive, or making eggnog, or watching that corny “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” cartoon. Celebrate and enjoy yourself. Be at peace.

Buy Bye for now.

I assure you that President Saddam Hussein has not been captured by the American soldiers. These crooks have glued a moustache to a farmer and told the world a great lie. Do not believe them!

This is a photograph of a Pygmy Marmoset - the smallest species of monkey in the world. They weigh an average of four ounces fully-grown. They live in rainforests in sections of Central and South America (specifically western Brazil, southeastern Colombia, eastern Ecuador, and eastern Peru).

The Pygmy Marmoset is not the smallest primate in the world though. That distinction currently belongs to the Pygmy Mouse Lemur of Madagascar which weighs an average of only 30.6 grams. (1 ounce = 28.35 grams)

My wife and I are avid readers. We each go through a book about once every week to two weeks. Over time, this becomes an expensive habit, and the monthly amazon.com bills are really starting to add up. But as it turns out, there’s this place in town that has thousands of books that you can borrow for like two weeks at a time, and it’s free! Just pick a book, read it, then bring it back. So yesterday, we made an exploratory visit to this “Public Library” and it did indeed contain many thousands of books. We even brought two books home, and no one has called to ask for them back yet, so the system appears to be working as advertised. I wonder why no one thought of this sooner?

Anyway, this is not about the library itself, but rather about what we found when we arrived. There is lettering attached to the building in such a way as to spell out “PUBLIC LIBRARY”. Only, somehow an ‘L’ has come up missing, so it now reads “PUB IC LIBRARY”. I suspect this was not an accident. In fact, knowing what I do of human nature, I have come to believe that this ‘L’ was deliberately removed in an act of vandalism. And though I am no detective, I believe I can construct a reasonable profile of the perpetrator - an adolescent male.

How do I know this? I used to be one. In my experience, I know that adolescent males have a propensity towards vandalism, and a love for toilet humor unmatched in any other demographic. This tends to manifest itself in many unique ways such as:

  Drawing of external genitalia on anatomical diagrams of the human reproductive system in high school textbooks.

  Prank phonecalls to every listed telephone number belonging to a Mr./Ms. Butts, Cox, Dick, Gaylord, Johnson, Peters, and Wang.

  Construction of large snow phalluses (though, to be fair, the first time I ever saw this, was in college)

  And, my personal favorite, the Magic Marker defacement of an advertisement for the “Museum of Art” into “Museum o’ fArts”

So, to the anonymous teen now running around with a silver letter ‘L’ on his keychain: Please bring it back. Just drop it down the after-hours book drop - no questions asked. Let’s all just put this silly little episode behind us. Believe me, 10 years from now, you will not look back on the time you made the library sign read “PUB IC” as a defining moment in your life. No one is laughing. Put the ‘L’ back.

Now, “Museum o’ fArts” on the other hand… that’s funny.

Bye for now.

So I hear there is an old folktale in parts of Europe in which an innkeeper stuffed two children in a pickle barrel on Christmas day. Interestingly enough, I cannot seem to find any information suggesting why said innkeeper would have done so. But regardless of motive, two children are now sealed in a pickle barrel. Then St. Nicholas happens by and saves the children from the pickle barrel by tapping it with his cane.

This story evidently begot a tradition in which a blown-glass Christmas tree ornament in the likeness of a pickle is placed on the family Christmas tree on Christmas Eve - presumably by Santa Claus himself. On Christmas morning, all the children run to the tree to be the first to find the pickle. Oh how they laugh and frolic! Then the lucky child who finds the pickle is rewarded with an extra gift from Santa, and gets to open the first gift of the morning.

So, in a nutshell, grab Santa’s pickle and win a toy. Then there’s the whole lap-sitting thing. I’m just sayin’…

Watch out for that pickle, kids.

Bye for now.

Hey everyone…

I know I’ve been quiet lately (again), but I’m working on something really cool for the holidays that’s going to involve all of you (and hopefully your friends, family, and neighbors too). I’m not going to say anything specific about it until I make it official, but I will say this for now…

If you’re about to buy holiday gifts online, please wait just a couple more days!

UPDATE: December 02, 2003, 16:38

After the cold meds wore off and I thought about this a little more, I’ve realized that I just don’t have enough time to do this The Right Way™ this year, so I’m going to shelve this idea for next year.

We now return to our regularly-scheduled programming.

UPDATE AGAIN: December 04, 2003, 23:05

OK - For those of you who have been dying to know what my plan was, check out my explanation in the comments section for this post.