You know it’s Christmas when…
- You find a half-empty cup of eggnog in your refrigerator and you mix it with milk and chocolate syrup for your breakfast drink.
- You get to eat slightly lumpy chipped beef on toasted bagel, because, well, you’re home for the holidays and you just do.
- Your artificial Christmas tree sheds needles like real one.
- You set up your outdoor inflatable Christmas decorations and two of them die. One right out of storage from last Christmas, and the other shortly after it has been set up and inflated for this year.
- In order to entice your significant other into at least being more tolerant of your outdoor inflatables, you replace one of the ones that dies with something she likes but you have no fondness for – an inflatable pink flamingo. Even though it’s carrying a gift and wearing a red stocking cap, it still is not a favorite.
- Two Christmas packages arrive and they rattle – but they shouldn’t.
- You find a Christmas card from several years back from a friend and mentor whom you had lost touch with and learned recently died earlier this year.
- You pay a repair to fix a major appliance, and the problem he finds is an easy fix you should have seen if you had been a little more on the ball.
- You receive a present you wanted, but it turns out not to be all that interesting, but you also receive a present that you didn’t want and it turns out to be the most interesting thing you received. In kids, this is known as “The-cardboard-box-is-more-fun-to-play-with-than-the-toy-inside phenomenon.” It happens with adults, too. We just don’t generally call it that, or own up to it.
- To boldly go where no Christmas tree has gone … recently. For the first time in five years you get to put up your Star Trek Christmas tree. And because you have so many, you decide to limit the decorations to those from The Original Series, because it is the original and you are that old.
- A young lady shows up at your doorstep, gently tapping on your door, a bag of homemade Michelle Obama’s shortbread cookies in her hand. She gives them to you and says, “Merry Christmas.” Then she scurries away.
- You’re driving around with you kids looking at Christmas lights and see Santa crossing the street and walking into a dive bar on the edge of your neighborhood. Not sure how to explain that one.
Nothing says Christmas quite like an inflatable pink flamingo in a red cap.
“Beam me somewhere Mr. Scott. Any ol’ place in Earth or space. You pick the century and I’ll pick the spot.”
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Happy Holidays, whichever ones you celebrate. Including Festivus for the Rest of Us,
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