The goose is getting fat

Christmas is coming for sure. I present my evidence:

1) Tree. Big tree right smack in the middle of everything. It blocks my desk and the peripherals therein, forcing me to only use my laptop on battery power and thereby limiting all my online sessions to strict 2 1/2-hour intervals. It also blocks half my bar, forcing me to drink only from the left side, which fortunately is where the bourbon is kept.

2) I nearly burned down my house with faulty string lights. Only once I year do I tangle (literally) with anything electrical. I also cheated death multiple times during the hanging process. (Is it me that hangs the lights, or the lights that hang me?)

3) Someone's been topping my Makers with a float of macadamia nut liqueur (which, fortunately, also lives on the left side of the bar).

4) Maus is in the kitchen putting the Keebler gnomes to shame. As Nearly Blogless Jeff would say, “Let's get ready to rummm-balllllllll...”

5) Water in the basement. Usually a post-holiday treat, Squishmas has come early this year thanks to the November snows. This, friends, is the year I beat it. The seepy invader has gone into retreat since all that snow melted, but it will be back, and I'm all geared up and ready for when it makes its move. Bring it.*

6) Mid-December shopping panic starting to set in. As usual, when I review my gifting-manifest at the two-week mark, I find I've overdone it on one person and totally stiffed someone else. These are rotating honors — every year a new individual gets to be the lucky one who almost gets my cats for Christmas.

7) Good TV has gone away; good movies have kicked in. Studio 60, Heroes, House, Smallville, Lost are all in hibernation until 2007 (and Battlestar has just one more episode to go). Which is fine — come the big bleak dark of January, they will all be needed. Instead, the evenings are filling with A Chistmas Story, The Shop Around the Corner, Desk Set, Beautiful Girls, White Christmas, Holiday Inn, Harry Potter, Miracle, It's a Wonderful Life, and Charlie Brown and Muppets galore. All this with a log burning in the fireplace, a mouthfull of rumballs chased with a sip of nutty bourbon, and a vague musty-ozonous whiff of bad wiring interlaced with seeping groundwater.

8) Finally, it wouldn't be Christmas without the familiar melodious strains of faithful believers of all stripes coming together in the spirit of the holidays and raising their voices in harmony to attack one another, point fingers of grinchiness, and sue each other for the right to be right. Oh, how you people warm my cockles. May your chestnuts get extra roasted this year.

*Note to the water: I'm engaging in rhetorical, hyperbolic chest-puffery here. I want only peace between us. I will be happy if we can just go our separate ways amicably. Please do not “bring it.” And Merry Christmas.