“Now, before you call me Ebeneezer Scrooge or jump all over my my seeming lack of Christmas spirit, let me just say that Christmas is far and away my favorite holiday and the source of some of my best memories. But these are just plain bad….”

• Place your children’s stuffed animals under the tree as a welcoming committee for Santa. I’m sure all the kids will feel great when they go to hug Mr. Snuggles and he’s full of pine needles and tree sap.
• Buy a pair of red flannel pajamas that you only wear on Christmas Eve. Red flannel…dang sexy.
• Let go of a problem you can’t solve. Enjoy the season. If we could do that so easily, it would be Christmas year-round.
• Bake Christmas cookies while a Johnny Mathis Christmas album plays in the background. Good idea, Suzy Homemaker.
• Wear a smile and a Santa hat when you walk through the mall. Sure, if you want to get kicked.
• When you’re with a child and see a blinking red light in the sky, ask her, ‘Do you think that could be Rudolph?’ Look, it is! And he just crashed into the side of that DC-10.

—I attended my first Christmas party of the season last night… (A Dash of Salt)

Jenny Anderson vents some exam-week stress all over her newly-unwrapped copy of The Little Book of Christmas Joys: 432 things to do for yourself and others that just might make this the best Christmas Ever by H. Jackson Brown, Jr. By the way… Amazon has a used copy on sale for eighteen cents! The UWEC English club could get a 2.5% commission on that $0.18 sale! What are you waiting for??