More holidays should have Kung Fu Panda-themed cards.
GateHouse — If there is any place on Earth more bruisingly depressing than the Valentine’s Day card rack at Target on Feb. 12, I’ve yet to hear about it. OK, that’s not entirely true, I can think of plenty more depressing places, such as the offices of whoever has to do promotion for the “Chipmunks” movies and wherever Newt Gingrich goes to apply his pre-stump speech neck-grease, but at least the people shopping at Target have their own non-billionaire-provided money, now that I think about it, so I think Gingrich wins for most depressing? Winning! Aw, that’ll be a weird feeling for him.
What am I doing here on Feb. 12, you may ask, judgingly? Well, usually I’m like weeks ahead of the Valentine’s situation, because I’m really super-thoughtful at all times, except this year, when I’m scraping together a Valentine plan with two kids, which is making the card selection process a lot more enjoyable and family-oriented and part of a bonding ha oh I’m just kidding it’s a miserable nightmare please tell me someone stashed burlap sacks full of painkillers in the “Get Well Soon” section or something.
But it’s not a nightmare because of the kids, who are being great, except the one who keeps drooling on my face. No, it’s a nightmare because of the desperate surfeit of miserable greeting card manufacturers.
Type "Christmas snake" into Google Images. It's fantastic
GateHouse — There are things that are OK, and there are things that are Not OK, and there are things that are Super Not OK, and there are things that are So Not OK That They Make You Slap Your Face And Run To Your Momma, and that is what brings us to the headline “Two Families Find Live Snakes Hiding In Christmas Trees.”
Christmas trees, according to everyone, are the second least-favorable places you can find a snake, the first being, say it with me, the toilet. This is my fourth-greatest fear in life, snakes in the toilet, directly behind clowns, the Fox Business Channel and having my picture taken while scuba diving in the ocean but then having the photographer start gesturing wildly and flailing around because there’s a whale swimming up behind me. That scene in “Finding Nemo” where the whale fades into view and eats the neurotic fish and Ellen? YEAH, WORST FEAR OF LIFE. Most of my more acute fears in life end up in Pixar movies. Weirdest thing.
Basically what I looked like, except I had a larger axe
GateHouse — We never cut down our own Christmas trees when I was a kid, mostly because it turned out that they sold objects very similar to Christmas trees at the Target in Marion, Ind. — and get this: You could hardly tell the difference! Well, there were a few giveaways: Instead of dropping crisp needles all over the carpet the fake ones appeared majestic and invincible for what was sometimes months (taking down the Christmas tree is super-boring), and instead of having to be cut down they could be disassembled like Legos and returned to their spot in the attic. That said, instead of smelling like fresh forest pine they smelled like a Target in Marion, Ind.
As such, Christmas was as much about getting out the tree as it was getting out the box the tree spent most of its year in. Being lucky enough to have both a Christmas-loving family and large ceilings (mostly the latter), our tree was a beast, a monstrous army-grade Artifical Douglas Fraser Fir Pine something (OK you got me I cheated my way through horticulture) that came in a box large enough to, if needed, store the car.
When you are a small person, boxes of course are the coolest toys ever, or at least up there with such perennial childhood chestnuts as bubble wrap, pieces of broken cement, packing peanuts and handfuls of gravel. This year marks my 36th of wondering what in the hell we’re all doing departing Thanksgiving dinner to camp under neon signs for off-brand tablet computers when if we give every kid in the country a pile of UPS bubble wrap, packing material and about 30 pounds of dirt kids would all be murderous-eyed with joy (except of course for the selfish materialistic ones, but we could just throw gravel at them).
McClatchy/Tribune – I am not a very good-looking woman, which I think is the primary reason I’m having trouble coming up with a decent Halloween costume this year. (It’s also the main reason I kept getting turned down for sororities, not that I’m still bitter about that, stupid Zeta Tau Alpha, I hate you so much.)
Indeed, if you have visited any costume stores lately, you might have noticed that they look less like costume stores and more like places that Britney Spears might shop, if she could stay sober long enough to park the car. Costume stores these days feature an irrationally large percentage of rack space devoted entirely to Sexy versions of average things: Sexy Nurse, Sexy Doctor, Sexy Soccer Player, Naughty Navigator, Sexy Mountie, Support Our Troops Sexy Adult (really), Sexy Wilma Flintstone (I can send you the link to these if you want). One newsroom staffer reported stumbling across a costume for a Sexy Cab Driver, which is, of course, something that has never happened in the history of the human experience. (However, if it does happen, I suggest immediately that we cancel Halloween and institute National I Found A Sexy Cab Driver Day, which we could commemorate by briefly increasing the national speed limit to 200 mph and growing splendid beards.)
"Excuse me, sir, but are you going to use that innertube?"
GateHouse — Having spent New Year’s Day at the Blizzard Beach water park in Disney World — the Happiest Place on Earth, particularly if your happiness revolves around disbursing $27.95 for chicken fingers — in sunny, godawful Orlando, Fla., I have already learned in 2011 these two important lessons:
To beat the crowds at a Disney water park, go in January.
The human body is a thing to be reviled and abhorred.
Visiting friends and a bit of pleasing randomness brought us to the county-sized neon bacchanal of Orlando, Fla. (town motto: “A Black Angus On Every Street Corner, But The Lord God Help You If You Need To Purchase A Vegetable”) over the New Year’s weekend, a time for new beginnings, personal re-energization and, in my case, the opportunity to ring in 2011 wandering around Downtown Disney listening to a didgeridoo player cover Ozzy Osbourne while drinking smuggled-in champagne. Yeah, that’s right. We smuggled hooch into Disney World. This makes us the COOLEST PEOPLE in the entire tenth grade! (Jeez, a lot of my Disney stories have drinks in them. I find I have the same problems with weddings and first communions.)
Anyway, I’m not usually one for making New Year’s resolutions — I’m keenly aware of my raft of personal failings on most days, thank you very much, designating a holiday to accentuate them seems needlessly vengeful — but I will tell you this, faithful reader(s) and/or people who got here by Googling “Tinkerbell Is Of Satan” and/or “Xerox Scrabble Cha Cha”: There is literally nothing on the planet that will leave you more relentlessly dedicated to your workout/exercise resolution than spending six hours at a Disney theme park in which most of your neighbors are unclothed and absorbing for yourself the unspeakable horrors of the aging male physique.
GateHouse — “Good morning, sir, how are you today?”
Great, and you?
“Great, thanks. Just these three?”
Yep, just these three, please.
“Anything in here fragile or liquid?”
Nope.
“Anything perishable?”
Nope. Not sending any ham today.
“That’s funny. Anything potentially hazardous?”
Nope. (This is what I say, although, technically speaking, I’ve found that anything can be “potentially hazardous” if it’s fired out of a large enough cannon.)
“Anything fragile or liquid?”
Neither. (This is what I say, although what I’d really like to say is, “It’s a vase from the Khang dynasty that I’ve filled with balsamic vinaigrette.”
GateHouse — So I’m in a Secret Santa thing here in the office, and like so many things about Christmas, it’s making me reach for the wine bottle well before my usual 10 a.m. start time, because I have now received no gift from my Secret Santa for the SECOND CONSECUTIVE DAY. This keeps up, I’m gonna start throwing elves.
Let me back up: No, I don’t hate Christmas, except the shopping and parking and most of the music and the way it makes me engage in the near-impossible task of actually absorbing more debt into my increasingly hilarious floral arrangement of credit cards (somewhere in Visa Fortress, I’m fairly well convinced that a group of doughy shareholders does the “Beat It” dance every time they see my name).
And yes, I know it’s better to give that receive, thank you very much, hippie Democrats, Charlie Brown and the nagging voice in my head that keeps me awake every single night.
Count Chocula is, needless to say, embroiled in a centuries-old feud with that shirtless werewolf cereal.
GateHouse — I have discovered two equally displeasing things about Halloween this year: 1. The neighbor down the road, the one on the corner at Sundew Court, which is like the least-evil name ever (she might as well live at Dew Drop Hug Soup Emotionally Supportive Boulevard) has produced a front-yard Halloween display of such breadth and creativity that frankly my fake tombstones (“Here Lies Doug M. Upp” — ka POW), cheesy blinking “Great Pumpkin” Linus and assortment of artfully sliced-up pumpkins looks like a cruel failure by comparison. The neighbor’s display occupies probably 2,500 square feet, likely required several meetings with the power company, includes what I’m sure were Army-sized rations of that cobwebby cotton stuff and is making the rest of us aspiring warlocks feel SUPER INADEQUATE. Thanks, Sundew Court. See if I include you in the next block party volleyball game.
The second, and obviously more important problem: I cannot buy Count Chocula anywhere remotely near my house, and/or Sundew Court.
I don’t want to minimize anyone’s problems. I know times are hard for everyone. Your boss is slicing back your hours and your bank is being a jerk, but frankly my problem is worse than any of yours multiplied by a fafillion, because none of you have, in the past week, driven around for a full afternoon stopping at five grocery stores in the futile hunt for a fictitious cocoa-based vampire who apparently IS NOT FOR SALE IN SOUTH CAROLINA, due to, I am sure, something Rush Limbaugh said once.
This creepy simulacrum of Tom Hanks will make you believe in Santa, at all costs.
Island Packet — I have put off writing this column for three years now, because at some point its publication will jab a lengthy and irrevocably infectious splinter into the relationship between my son and me, probably even more than the horrible truth about what really happened to his fish when we got back from vacation. (I am afraid, little man, they did not go to the ocean for a visit.)
But I cannot let another holiday season pass without sounding a whistle of warning about what is possibly the third-weirdest Christmas-themed show ever (right behind “Carrie Underwood: An All-Star Holiday Special” and “A Left Behind’ Christmas,” in case you were wondering): “The Polar Express,” which is soulless and inorganic and creepers and depicts a world populated entirely by CGI robot Tom Hankses and is also partially responsible for my having to call 911 in late 2008, but more on that later.
“The Polar Express” was made by computers and Hanks plays everybody and it still cost $165 million to make, most of which ostensibly went to determining how many dead-eyed Talking Metaphors with leathery alien skin could be installed into a quiet 32-page children’s book.
GateHouse — IMPORTANT CARTOON-AND-BLACK PRESIDENT ALERT: In addition to being a Muslim Kenyan chain-smoking Bolshevik Hitler-loving child-indoctrinating reality-TV-contestant-inviting Will.I.Am fan, Barack Obama hates Charlie Brown. This is actually no great shakes because most of the “Peanuts” kids hate Charlie Brown, but Obama hates Charlie Brown in a way that efficiently connotes his hatred of America as well. (If America wanted to kick the football Obama would be all like, “Whiff, suckers,” and then throw mayonaise on the Little Red-Haired Girl.)
And I have proof, because of Facebook, and Tennessee, in that order.
Last week’s airing of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” the special that’s been beloved for decades despite being about 25 solid minutes of the emotional abuse of a child, was pre-empted on the television machine by Herr President Omuslim’s speech about his strategy for the war in Afghanistan, or some such nonsense you could read about on the crawl under the Tiger-sexting stuff anyway.
Socialists wouldn’t blink a red eye at this transgression, but it COMPLETELY CHEESED OFF the mayor of Arlington, Tenn., a Very Real American named Russell Wiseman, who looks in his mug shot as though he is desperate to sell you a Toyota this very instant. Wiseman wrote on his Facebook page, which has 1,600 friends, the following, which I am quoting directly so as to preserve his deliciously roguish twist on spelling and grammar: “Ok, so, this is total crap, we sit the kids down to watch ‘The Charlie Brown Christmas Special’ and our muslim president is there, what a load…..try to convince me that wasn’t done on purpose. Ask the man if he believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and he will give you a 10 minute disertation about it….w…hen the answer should simply be ‘yes’….”
I'm a a writer for such outlets as Men's Health, Paste, Billboard and brucespringsteen.net, a writer/editor at Nickelodeon's humor site NickMom.com, a syndicated humor columnist for GateHouse, a very slow runner and a father of two (the younger of whom has been personally approved by Bruce Springsteen) on the coast of South Carolina. Even longer bio/clips.
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