christmas

Choosing the Right Christmas Tree

Denisa and I have used a fake tree for . . . pretty much our whole marriage? Can I admit that in Maine without getting lumberjacked in the middle of the night? We received a very nice one as a gift back when we were first married, and we’ve been using it ever since. It’s just seemed easier to go down to the basement and haul it out each year. But over the years, it’s gotten older and older. Strings of lights are harder to jury rig back to working order, and last year I never could get one strand […]

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A Letter from Santa Claus

TRC and I had an . . . interesting conversation last night. It didn’t go too terribly well. Thankfully, I sent off a missive to the North Pole for a bit of help, and I promptly received a reply this morning, with a personal note from the fat man himself for my son. I had to peek–curiosity got the better of me, and if that means I get fewer presents this year, so be it. I thought some of you might be interested to see what the note had to say, so I’m posting it here for your perusal. Really

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The Chaos of Christmas

I love me some Christmas, and I love a well-decorated house, but so help me if getting that house to “well-decorated” status isn’t pretty much impossible some years. This year seems especially bad, with Denisa teaching all her classes and all of our stuff from our Thanksgiving trip scattered throughout the house. We’ve gotten all of the decorations out of the basement, at least. Does that count? Can we just stick a few ribbons on the boxes and call it good? Something tells me the kids wouldn’t be okay with that. I suppose a lot of this is something we

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Our Country is Facing a Crisis, Friends

Don’t you love the word “friends”? It adds emphasis and gravitas to just about any situation. Compare, “We’re out of toilet paper,” which seems like a banal observation, to “We’re out of toilet paper, friends.” Suddenly, you know you’re facing a life changing moment of immense importance. Stuff just got real, folks. (Folks is another word like “friends.”) In any case, my confrontation with the harsh realities of our time came–as most confrontations of this sort do these days–during a recent visit to Walmart. Denisa and I have been on the busy side lately, and so I went shopping with her

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Why Groundhog Day Might Be Better Than Christmas

Let’s get the religious argument out of the way right off the kicker. I’m not here to say that Groundhog Day is more important than the celebration of Christ’s birth. (Though I might argue that Christmas these days is about more than the celebration of said birth. But today’s blog post isn’t about that, and it would take me too long to get into it at the moment . . .) No–for my current purposes, I’m just looking at the expectations we all have of any particular day. When I get up on a work day, I have an idea

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