Christmas Observations
First of all I'd like to wish all of you a Merry Christmas (is "Merry" capitalized there? I tried it the other way and it just didn't look right). As we speak right now I'm at my apartment watching the Green Bay Packers play the Minnesota Vikings. Why am I not with my family? Well that's because, like the majority of families in this state, we scheduled Christmas Eve around the football game. Where in California Christmas is scheduled around breast augmentation surgery, in Wisconsin it's scheduled around football.

I finally realized how old I am now when my parents just give me money and told me to buy all my Christmas gifts for myself. Is there anything more sterile and lacking any emotion than that? Why not just line up our family in a single-file line and hand out gifts from behind an enclosed booth? Christmas used to be the most exciting time of the year when I was a kid, now it's just a dreaded social-event filled with awkward conversations. I think it's because Christmas is so close to Thanksgiving. I just saw all these people a month ago, the novelty is gone. We should move these two holidays a few months more apart. I'm on a pretty solid schedule of family events including Fourth of July, Thanksgiving and Christmas. We need to move Christmas to March or something.

And seriously, what is the deal with egg nog? That stuff is so awful. If I have a choice I'm just going to drink straight brandy and hold the egg nog. Tonight a few of my friends plan on getting together to celebrate Christmas the way it should be celebrated--by going to the bar. The plan is to hit up some of the local townie bars. Townie bars always crack me up in that sort of "how incredibly depressing" sort of way. I'm guessing Christmas Eve will be in a class of it's own. I don't even want to know the thoughts going through the mind of the dude at the end of the bar staring down at his glass for four hours.

Realistically though, as awkward as the "how's school" conversations are and as annoyed as I used to get by how many times people asked me "how is California", family-time is pretty cool in it's own way. Hopefully all of you will try to remember that the next few days, because I know I'm going to try to do just that. All right everybody, I am out.