10 Things You Should Be Shoving In Your Mouth Right Now

  Well, I suppose you don’t actually have to shove things, if that seems especially violent and unsocial to you. We all have our own preferred methods of delivering cargo to our pie-holes, so feel free to do what you must, as long as it’s relatively legal and no one is injured in the process. Anyway, the following delicacies should be placed on your tongue as soon as humanly possible, unless there are religious or self-confidence issues holding you back:

1. Ghiradelli Intense Dark Cabernet Matinee

  That’s right, folks. Chocolate with a hint of wine flavoring. Now, maybe such a pairing is a widely-known treat that has been around forever, and I’m just late to the game. (It wouldn’t be the first time, I don’t get out all that much.) But when I walked around the corner and came upon this staring at me in the candy section, I was stunned. It was all I could do to keep from ripping the package open right then. The only thing that kept me from doing so was the fear that I might make extremely-satisfied noises that would send small children scurrying to their parents with reports that a strange man had just gone into heat in aisle 4.

  I realize that some people are not fond of dark chocolate, convinced that the slightly bitter taste is somewhat of the devil and should be avoided entirely. (I don’t know why these people think that, but I suspect that it is a reflection of a poorly-supervised upbringing or some maladjustment in their DNA.) I also understand that some folks are not cray-cray about the vino, and I’ll admit that wine is usually not my first choice in any given alcohol-involved situation. But there are certainly times when a nice glass of wine or seven can be quite satisfying, or at least give you the appearance of being sophisticated and refined, until you forget to point your pinky whilst drinking, and then you are shunned and excommunicated by people who have more money than you.

  In any case, the wine aspect of this little treat is not overpowering, fighting to get your attention like those annoying children in restaurants who scream and throw things because their parents are idiots who “don’t believe in discipline” and let their offspring completely dominate them. There’s no actual alcohol in this chocolate (dang it!), just a blackberry/dark grape essence  that is quite satisfying and makes one think of evenings in Paris. (Or at least watching a movie where cute couples are falling in love in Paris, before one of them does something stupid that causes a breakup and results in Adele singing a sad ballad while the end credits roll.)

2. Hidden Valley Smoked Bacon Ranch Sandwich Spread

  My absolute favorite condiment to put on a sandwich is actually Hellmann’s mayo. Love it, can’t get enough of it, would gladly marry it if the Supreme Court would make it legal. But my lover has a terrible secret, in that there’s enough fat in just one tablespoon of that stuff to block the arteries of half the population of Idaho. (Which, granted, is only three people, but still, that’s three people with blockage and the related medical bills. Not good.) So I’m always desperately searching for something to go on my sandwiches that is almost as pleasing but not nearly as life-threatening.

  Okay, maybe “desperately searching” is a bit of a stretch. It’s more along the lines of “every once in a while I remember that I’m supposed to be eating things that will help keep my cholesterol numbers from being higher than the Gross National Product, and I’ll walk past the Hellman’s in the grocery store and grudgingly review the lighter-fat options, pouting the entire time because eating healthy completely sucks”.

  Then this little guy recently made his debut on the shelves, and I’m happy to report that it’s rather tasty, especially when compared to other “low fat” spreads that always seem to have a chemical tang to them that I don’t appreciate at all, like I’m smearing nuclear waste on my buns. (This stuff is also good as a dip for fried chicken nuggets and mozzarella cheese sticks, which sort of negates the low-fat objective, but you know I had to try it.) And if the bacon and ranch theme is not your thing, this guys has three siblings with intriguing names like “roasted garlic and parmesan” and “chipotle pepper”. (I haven’t slept with the rest of the family yet, but I plan to do so, because I’m a food whore.)

3. Kansas City Prime Steak Flavor Chips

  Now, I’ve never been a super big fan of steak. (Much to the shock and dismay of the rest of my family in Oklahoma, giving them yet another item on their spreadsheet entitled “why does Brian have to be so difficult and opinionated about crap”.) I actually like the flavor, but there’s something about the commitment to extensive chewing that puts me off. And the random, surprise bits of gristle. (Ugh.) So you won’t see me eating steak unless it’s the only thing on the menu or a court order has been issued.

  So why would I even throw something like this in my shopping cart? Because it’s different. I’ll try anything once, just to see what it’s like, sometimes out of simple respect for the person who had the courage, vision and/or mental illness to come up with the product in the first place. This means there are times when something gets one bite taken out of it, then it goes in the trash, forever banished and scorned. (Some dreams should be killed before incurring production and development costs.) Other times it’s a spiffy little success, like with these chips, which have the flavor of steak without the need for jaw-muscle fatigue or allowing rednecks to have access to steak knives.

4. Chobani Greek Yogurt – Coffee with Dark Chocolate Chips

  Yogurt is one of those things that you either love or hate, sort of like Ben Stiller movies. After all, it’s basically a dairy product that has been fermented, which sounds like something nasty that you would hurl out of your refrigerator and never speak of again. On the other hand, cheese is a fermented dairy product, and most people can’t get enough of that, so I don’t understand what all the fuss is about with people turning up their noses at the thought of eating something with bacteria in it. (These same people will happily French kiss their boyfriends, sticking their tongue in a far more unhealthy environment. Go figure.)

  But I love yogurt. I love Greek yogurt even more, though I must confess that I didn’t even know there was such a thing until the last year or so. When I first saw it on the shelves, I was stymied. Greek yogurt? What makes it Greek? (The easy answer, it was made in Greece, you fool, is proven false by simply checking the production site on the package.) Wait, maybe Greek yogurt is made with ouzo, that wonderfully-strong Greek alcohol that can make you lose your mind, dance energetically in a circle while people clap, and wake up the next morning with a goat in your bed. (Personally, I’ve only experienced two of those things.)

  Sadly, no ouzo. The “Greek” part refers to the method of production, where there’s extra straining and manipulating to create a much thicker yogurt, packed with protein that, along with the digestive-aiding charm of the other ingredients, makes this a very healthy thing to eat. (Unless, of course, you have some type of death-resulting reaction to one of those ingredients, in which case you probably wouldn’t appreciate eating yogurt, since that would be your last meal and all. Then again, a celery stick can kill you if the circumstances are just right, so you have to pick your battles, right?)

  So, if you like Greek yogurt (thick and creamy!), like the taste of coffee (the basic kind of java, not one of those concoctions you get at the trendy coffee shops, where they add so much foo-foo crap that the presence of actual coffee no longer has any relevance), and you like dark chocolate (I know, I know, too items on this list concerning dark chocolate, I clearly have an obsession), then this brand and this flavor is just what you need. I’m sure another company or two have something similar, but I don’t want to know about it, because then I would have to choose between them, torn between two lovers, feeling like a fool…

5. Brown Rice Triscuits – Sea Salt and Black Pepper

  Brown rice is another one of those “supposed to be better for you” kind of things floating around in the culinary ether, with certain people expounding it’s virtues like they’ve just been to an Enya concert and they are still tingling with excitement. I’m sure it’s nice and healthy, but the only real experience I’d had with brown rice, at least that I’m aware of, was at sushi restaurants. Some of the rolls now feature brown rice, probably at the insistence of one of those people who like to circulate petitions on the Internet. But when you compare it to the fluffy brightness of the white rice, which makes the vibrant bits of raw fish pop even more, the brown rice just looks drab and step-child like. Not as pretty. And food really should try to look its best if it wants to win any awards or get a date on Saturday night.

   But I greatly enjoy Triscuits, in almost all of the various flavor forms. (There’s one certain flavor that just doesn’t do it for me, but I refuse to speak its name, because that would just give the flavor more exposure than it really deserves, just like a Kardashian.) So when I noticed this version of Triscuit business lined-up on the store shelf, my immediate reaction was “Hurray! Sea salt and black pepper!”. (My eyes went there first.) This was followed by a slightly-dejected “Uh oh, these are made with brown rice. I bet they’re ugly just like the sushi.”

  And I was right, these things will not place in a beauty pageant, looking like someone took some regular Triscuits, boiled them for a while, and then threw them in the dryer too long, making them smaller than their more-glamorous cousins. (They do have a nice little sheen to them, though. I don’t know where that comes from (bits of ground-up glass?), but it keeps the product design from being completely insulting.) I popped one in my mouth, curious.

  The result was quite pleasing. It’s a different taste from a regular Triscuit, which may startle people who are not quite ready for it, but it’s not a bad taste. And the amount of salt and pepper was just right, not too much of either. But there was a tiny bit of a wang after I had swallowed, a lingering bit of something that needed to be rectified. And I instinctively knew just what the resolution would require.

  Cheese. Specifically, a slice of sharp cheddar. Naturally, we always have some of that around, because cheese is often called in as edible-reinforcements in this house, and I quickly had a baby open-faced sandwich ready to go. It was clearly the right decision, because twenty minutes later half the box of crackers and an entire brick of cheese no longer existed on this planet. Yum.

6. Blue Diamond Almonds – Rosemary and Black Pepper

  Almonds are an evil thing, even more so when it comes to Blue Diamond and their enticing flavored almonds. Almonds have a split personality, containing both the “good” fat (the kind you need for proper digestion, glowing skin, improved social standing, and world peace) and the “bad” fat (the kind we are warned to never eat or the Earth will fall out of the sky, even though 97.8% of all known food items are brimming with this bad fat). This results in a horrible, soul-killing tightrope that we have to walk. Many nutritionists recommend eating a very small handful of almonds every day. A very, very small handful.

  We’re talking 5 almonds. That’s it.

  If you go beyond this miniscule, almost-laughable ration, you destroy the goodness you have done for your body  and thirty years of going to the gym will be instantly destroyed the very second that the sixth almond passes your lips. You have to stop at five. And this is simply impossible to do when there is an open can of Blue Diamond almonds within a five-block radius, especially the more exotic flavors like this Rosemary and Black Pepper combo, the consumption of which is almost sexually-gratifying. I don’t know who this Rosemary is, or what she did to become a snack seasoning, but I’m a much better person for having known her.

  By the way, this flavor is only available at Target. I’m not sure who slept with whom to make this arrangement happen, but that’s how it breaks down. And as is usually the case with these “only at” handshakes, this flavor will probably disappear before too long. So get your ass in the car and set the GPS for Target. And don’t worry about the stop-lights, those things are insignificant in the end. Besides, do you really want to abide by the law and risk never meeting Rosemary? I think not.

  Hmm. I just realized that out of the six entries so far, two involve dark chocolate and two involve black pepper. Very interesting. This probably means that I should seek out some delicacy that involves both of those ingredients, but I’m not sure about that mash-up, dark chocolate and black pepper. Who is going to make something that like that?

  Hold up. What’s this?

  Oh. My. GOD. Dark chocolate with lemon and black pepper!

  Um, I think the rest of this list will have to wait until a later date. Right now I need to find me one of these and go have some quality personal time. I’ll catch up to you later…

The 12 Pains of Christmas – Part 2

Click Here to read Part 1…

4. The madness of idiots who have somehow passed a driving test at some point in their lives.

  Granted, the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex is not going to win any awards for civility on the roadways. Many of these people are already cray cray, having escalated the art of vehicular insubordination to a level that would stun the residents of smaller towns and hamlets across the nation. I’d almost say that these demon drivers consider it a badge of honor to terrorize neighboring cars as often as possible, but it’s fairly obvious that these folks have long since lost the concept of honor, if they ever grasped such a concept, and they have been reduced to grunting animals who simply haven’t been arrested yet.

  But once we have reached the Thanksgiving milestone each year? Holy COW, does it get wicked, and fast. Maybe it’s the whole Black Friday thing, that shopping hell-frenzy created by retailers, wherein consumers are convinced to stand in line for 72 hours for a DVD player they don’t really need because the one they already have works just fine. (Screw Hi-Def, do you really need to see every single pore on Angelina Jolie’s face? Like she has any. And the plot of the movie is still the same, regardless of whether or not you can see each individual blade of grass in the climactic rescue scene.)

  Yep, that could be the catalyst. We have a shopping day where the Retail Gods convince the peasants that they must fight and rip at each other to somehow gain an advantage in a line that leads to a pointless victory, and then those same peasants are tossed out of the stores once the poorly-planned stock is gone. (Dudes, why advertise a sale if you are going to run out of the product 3 minutes after the store opens?) And the peasants, still pumped with adrenaline, get back on the highways and byways and they are out for blood, because they didn’t get the latest i-Whatever.

  And this uncontrolled dissatisfaction and anger lasts for another month. From T-Day until C-Day, bitter people rule the roadways and cause considerable distress for the smart people who planned ahead and bought what they needed on eBay three months ago, at a better price and without having to sleep in a tent made out of discarded fast-food wrappers in front of a chain store.

  Whatever is stuck in their craw, these mindless zombies behind the wheels of SUVs increase exponentially come Yuletide season, their otherwise-flatlined neural centers minimally reactivated by some holiday trigger. You can be innocently driving to the local supermarket, breathing in the aroma of your eggnog-scented car freshener and thinking pleasant thoughts about a kitten video you watched on YouTube, and BAM, hundreds of out-of-control vehicles are suddenly swarming all over the road, driven by demons hell-bent on forcing you to plummet into a nasty ditch and spill your pumpkin-spice latte.

  So you need to protect yourself. Call your insurance agent right now and demand something like this: “Update my policy to protect me against anything an idiot can do in a functioning motor vehicle. Anything. And maybe throw in a clause or something that will save my ass if I snap and pull some Walking Tall business with a meat cleaver, because it might come to that. And stop sending me those asinine holiday calendars that always go directly in the trash. You’re not on my Christmas list and I shouldn’t be on yours.” Click.

5. The radio stations that start playing Christmas music at the end of September.

  Jesus would not approve of this. Stop it.

6. Those Salvation Army people with their stupid bells.

  Okay, first, there’s that whole mess with the Salvation Army actively doing whatever they can to restrict the rights of gay people in this country, and that some of the loose change you pluck into their rusty bucket goes right into the funding for such an un-Christian stance. (Haven’t heard of this? Go do some clicking on the Web. I can wait.) I’m already not going to give the bell-ringers a single penny, but does that stop them from getting in my face with a device that should only be used to signal the household staff that you’re ready for your bath to be drawn?

  No, it does not.

  Here they come, arms pumping and bells clanging, despite the fact that I’m babbling with my same-sex partner about the latest Lady Gaga CD. (If these fools had read the bylaws of their organization, they would know that my kind are considered the work of the devil, and if you piss us off enough we can direct the paths of hurricanes with our sheer debauchery. Why are you begging for our tainted rainbow money?)

  I just want to walk into the store and help the economy, since some of our elected officials clearly don’t want to do anything about it. I don’t want to fight my way past somebody with irrational focus issues that seems determined to psychologically abuse me with a musical instrument that no one has taken seriously since the Mayflower slammed into that rock. Get. Out. Of. My. Way. Do they train you to do this? That’s some jacked-up wrongness right there.

  Of course, on the flip side of the manic ringers who think that every human walking in their general direction is a beast to be sonically conquered, we have the total-slacker ringers who couldn’t be more obvious that they would rather be doing anything else in the world, including oral surgery. They just stand there in a dirty Santa hat, smoking a cigarette and lethargically waving the bell with a minimum of effort so that the thing only makes tiny clicks. You could throw a Buick into their bucket and they wouldn’t even blink.

7. The trashiness of certain customers in retail establishments.

  I understand that some people are just generally pigs. Nothing can be done about it, they’ve been that way all of their lives, we’re better off trying to rehabilitate the previously-decent folks who are drifting toward a life of sloth and negligence due to experimental drug-usage, unsatisfying romantic relationships, and failed attempts at climbing the corporate ladder. But still, one would think that the Trashy Folk could take a shower and try to be decent during the holidays.

  Sadly, this does not happen. Rather, the Trashy Folk seem to be on some sort of pork-rind inspired mission to prove to the world that nothing is sacred and we all might as well stop reading books and just go rut in the jungle. Specific case in point: The Christmas section at your local Target. Or more pointedly, what that section looks like after the doors open and the unwashed are allowed to touch things.

  Things start out fine, with energetic employees lovingly arranging the products in a manner that inspires joy and harmony. (The concepts, not the backup singers for the latest funk-rap band.) Everything is glowing with childhood memories and a bit of sparkly glitter, because things just aren’t properly festive until glitter is introduced, ask any drag queen. It’s a lovely scene that could probably be in a movie where Sandra Bullock debates which hunky guy would prove more satisfying under the mistletoe.

  Two seconds after those fabled front doors open, you would think you were at a nuclear testing facility in the desert sands of Nevada.

  Fragile ornaments have been unjustly thrown on the floor and shattered, strings of Christmas lights have been ripped from their boxes and stretched all the way from here to the pharmacy (and you can never get those things back in the box), the wrapping paper bins have been knocked asunder like The Three Little Pigs story originally had four porcine characters before the closeted editor decided to chop out the subplot about the gay piggy with his fabulous foil-wallpaper house, and the Christmas candy has been both sampled and spat out in one aisle that is now a minefield of sugared goo.

  What is wrong with people?

8. The Christmas cards that you fully intend to send but never do.

  The art of selecting and sending Christmas cards is truly a fine thing indeed. Or at least it used to be. But that was back in the day when people had both patience and a lack of other things to distract them when the weather turned cold and you could no longer leave the house, just like Laura Ingalls Wilder when she was surviving all those blizzards where they nearly lost the livestock if it weren’t for Pa and his rugged manliness.

  In the current day, three things intrude on the sending of folded-cardboard greetings.

  One: We now have the technology to communicate with each other every day, several times a day if you happen to be one of those miracle people who have jobs where you don’t have to actually do anything. Texting, skyping, group-chatting, sexting. We can reach out and touch anyone as long as we have the right data plan. What’s the point of sending something through the mail if it means you have to wait a week for the payoff?

  Two: Have you looked at the card selections lately in your local chain store? (Assuming that you can claw your way past the bell-ringers and the folks camping out to save three dollars on an electronic device that will be obsolete in 20 minutes.) Most cards these days are inane, aiming at the lowest common denominator with “jokes” that wouldn’t make a sea urchin laugh. And the cost? Ten bucks for four cards. Even more if you want actual envelopes, or a message that hasn’t been so politically-corrected that it’s more boring than the fruit cup at a retirement home.

  Three: Time. Who has enough of that any more, with our crazed rushing to accomplish so much that in the end proves meaningless. Maybe that’s what I’ll ask for this Christmas. Time. I’d like some of that, please, so I can sit down and sip some hot chocolate and watch the tree twinkle and listen to old-school Christmas songs that haven’t been mangled by the latest pop star and not worry about wrapping everything and just breathe.

  But I still want that i-Whatever under the tree as well, the one that can sync all my contacts, allow me to push a button and record my favorite TV show while I’m being booked at the county jail for slapping a drunk Santa, and scrub the toilet until it shines…

To Be Continued…

The 12 Pains of Christmas - Part 1

1. Getting all that crap out of the attic.

  Dragging boxes out of their non-holiday nursing home wasn’t such a big deal 20 years and 30 pounds ago. It wasn’t my favorite activity even then, but I could generally haul the goods in under 15 minutes without breaking a sweat or requiring reconstructive surgery after the deed was done. Then again, those were my “salad” days (translation: broke-ass poor) and I had maybe three boxes of mostly handmade or handed-down yuletidery.

  Now? Good God.

  Just opening the attic door and lowering the ancient ladder causes me to have a small anxiety attack, with whimpering and such. Then I have to rest halfway up that stupid ladder because I’m so out of shape that turning on a light switch wears me out. After the pit stop, I finally make it up to the last few rungs where I can begin the ritual of searching for the invisible hanging chain that is connected to the light that only gets turned on twice a year, four times if something dies up there and we notice an odd smell while watching Survivor.

  This quest for fire, with lots of Helen Keller arm waving, usually lasts at least 5 minutes, two minutes of which are spent recovering from rounds of nearly losing my balance and plummeting to my death. (And of course there’s no one down there to help break my fall. As soon as I utter the hellish words “It’s time to get the Christmas stuff out of the attic”, there’s an instantaneous mass exodus from the house, with relatives and friends and family pets fleeing for their lives, scampering to hide behind bushes and trees and startled neighbors, communicating via walkie-talkie until all agree that the risk of returning is minimal.)

  It’s just me and the mice droppings. Alone again, naturally.

  And when I finally locate the light chain and pull on it with the exasperated fury of a Kardashian who doesn’t yet have her own designer cologne or country, casting a weak light on the contents of the Hell Above Our Heads? Boxes. Boxes from here to China in all directions. Towers of boxes. If you need to hide from the po-po, just head up here, and your story will someday appear on Unsolved Mysteries.

  To be fair, most of this mess is my own doing. As some of you know, I have an obsession with setting out a Christmas Village every year. (You can read some of the sordid details here.) I’ve toned it down a bit for the past few years, but there was a long stretch where my madness for acquiring miniature real estate knew no boundaries, with me snapping up tiny houses with a feverish intensity that nearly, and should have, led to an intervention.  Or an exorcism. Something.

  But even though I acknowledge 97% of the responsibility for the fact that there isn’t a single inch of available floor space in the attic (2 of the 712 boxes have things in them that are not mine, which therefore means that I am not alone in my transgressions and thusly everyone shares in the guilt, even the cats, who own nothing up here), it doesn’t mean I can’t fuss about it. So I do.

  I whine as I’m flat on my belly, my body contorted unnaturally as I stretch for a box of must-use ornaments that have been shoved into a far corner for some ungodly reason, a tiny space where even Jiminy Cricket wouldn’t be able to wear his top-hat, yet the box has been crammed in there somehow. I whine as I stumble-fall down the ladder under the weight of an enormous tub that has 50 rolls of after-Christmas bargain wrapping paper in it. I whine as I’m lying face-down on the couch hours later, my body wracked with spasming muscles that haven’t been used in 11 months, half-heartedly listening to the all-clear alert that has been sounded in the neighborhood so my family can return home.

2. That stupid wrapping paper in the stupid enormous tub.

  We have three of those tubs. Well, at least three that I can identify in a police line-up. (Since I’ve pulled back on my Christmas Village display, from a time when I used to cover an entire 20x40 room down to just a subsection of that abused room, I don’t even use a big chunk of the boxed houses in the attic anymore. There are stacks of houses that haven’t even been inventoried in years. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me to walk (crawl?) around one of those stacks and discover Amelia Earhart and Jimmy Hoffa having tea.)

  Anyway, the wrapping paper. We have more than we could possibly use for the next 50 years. We could wrap a fleet of Buicks in foil paper and not even make a dent in the stock. And I’m not talking about the pointless rolls of paper, the kind where you can only wrap two CD’s and you’re already down to the cardboard tube. Nope, these are the industrial rolls, where a single roll could repave all the streets in my neighborhood and you’d still have enough left over to papier-mâché the Statue of Liberty. Big. Ass. Rolls.

  How did this happen, you ask? Well, there’s a two-fold answer. Exhibit A is the fact that I lose control when they first introduce the new wrapping-paper designs each holiday season. I’m fully aware that we already have enough wrapping paper that activists concerned about the Brazilian rainforest have started an online petition to have me placed in lock-up for the last three months of each year.

  But I still can’t help myself. When I see the shiny new patterns and designs, there are always several that I must have, even if somebody has to get hurt in the process. So I snag the ones I want and throw them into the shopping cart, next to the suntan lotion because the start of the retail Christmas season has officially been moved to Independence Day. Then I lug my purchases home and throw them in a tub and no one ever sees them again. Except possibly Amelia and Jimmy.

  Exhibit B has two perpetrators, myself and my partner. (He’s very tight with his money, never paying full price for anything unless a court order is involved, so he can resist the pre-Christmas temptation of paying 86 dollars for two designer sheets of wrapping paper.) But once Santa has gone back to the North Pole where he can live with hundreds of small boys and no one asks questions about it? Well, we’re both on the post-sales like crack-heads in the flour aisle at Piggly Wiggly.

  How can you NOT buy something when it’s super cheap and you might possibly use it before the end of the century? That’s just un-American. When a roll of paper the size of a cheddar wheel has been slashed to fifty cents, that puppy is going in the basket, even if the design printed on the paper is a little questionable and clashes with the tree decorations and everything else in the house.

  Moral of the story? We never use most of that discount paper. A few rolls, yes, on gifts for those relatives where you are obligated to get them a little something but you really don’t care for them and your heart isn’t in it (don’t lie, we all have those kinfolk), so you end up shoving their present to the back of the tree in that mystery zone where you eventually always find that one present that no one claims to have wrapped, with a name tag of somebody you don’t know. (“Aunt Charlene? Who the hell is Aunt Charlene? Anybody?”)

  Crickets chirp.

3. The Tree of Pain

  There was a time when I was equally divided between having a “live” Christmas tree and an artificial one. Live trees are pretty swell, I love the smell of them and the uniqueness of each tree. Downside? The damn needles that fall off constantly, of course, ending up from one end of the house to the other, aided and abetted by pets who are religiously convinced that these needles must be shared with the world and the bare feet that walk upon it.

  Oh, and we mustn’t forget the watering angle. This is not a particularly taxing aspect of live-tree nurturing, but a healthy tree can suck up gallons of liquid before it realizes that its days are numbered, and it can be quite easy to forget to keep an eye on the bucket of nourishment neath the tree. And when you do forget, two horrid things happen: One, the tree can become so dried out that someone lighting a cigarette at the convenience store two blocks over can inadvertently cause your house to burn down. And two, those damn needles are no longer pliant and less able to pierce the skin. They are now hardened spikes that qualify for regulation by government authorities.

  Now, a fake tree is no walk in the park, by any means. First off, there’s the misconception about the box that it comes in. That box is only adequate storage for the tree parts for a very limited amount of time, namely the duration of the trip from the store where you bought it to your house. Once you slice the binding tape on said box, the Christmas music playing in the background should change to the soundtrack from The Exorcist.

  Because that tree is never going to fit in that box again. Ever.

  Try as you might, it’s just not going to happen. Sure, the first year, you might get most of the parts back into the original receptacle. You’ll sweat your ass off doing so, but the tree has not yet learned that you are its bitch and is still mostly cooperative.

  Within two years you can only get half of the tree parts in the box. Within four, the whole process is pointless. The box now has the consistency of wet toilet paper, ripping apart if you breathe on it, and the only thing that fits in the box is the tree stand, and that thing has lost a critical turn screw (the cat denies involvement, but you know that Fluffy has lied in the past during interrogations) and you might as well throw the stand away. Or at least into the stack of older, rusty stands that have also disappointed their parents.

  The turning point for me? The invention of the pre-lit artificial tree.

  This was a sign that there is a god of some kind, a caring god, one that does not want his/her children to suffer through the mind-wrecking ordeal of stringing lights on a Christmas tree, a horrendous task that the World Health Organization should ban based on the number of divorces and voluntary commitments to insane asylums that have resulted from a burnt-out bulb that cannot be found.

  So it’s been pre-lits for me ever since. You simply connect the various parts of the tree together (using the instruction manual, written by someone making two cents an hour and who really doesn’t know any other English than “Lady Gaga”), connect the various electrical plugs (which can be a bit tricky, since you will initially encounter more female plugs than male plugs, something that historically only happens on the island of Lesbos or at the Dinah Shore Invitational, but keep at it and things will balance out), and then shove the main plug into a socket that hopefully has the blessing of the local chapter of the IBEW.

  Et voila! Pretty lights without the need for attorneys and restraining orders.

  Now, the pre-lit does not get my full love and support. It’s still an artificial tree, and as such, it is subject to the new tree-fabrication technology that allows these things to be manufactured in a manner where the various branches have been so tightly wound together that it looks like a small shrub on the conveyor belt in the factory located in a country that does not recognize things like a minimum wage that actually means anything.

  This production process allows the tree to be nestled in a box that you will never use again. It also means that you must now “fluff” the tree, once it has been released in your home.

  Fluffing = misery. It takes forever to pry the little branch-lets away from the main branch. And you can’t screw around with this prying. You have to shape and mold each little tendril or your tree will look like road-kill. This means that, even though you got the Express Pass with the “not having to string lights” angle, you must still spend a considerable amount of time with the fluffing. Hours and hours. Long enough that by the time you are finished, everyone else has gone to bed.

  Except the cat. The cat who has been eyeing your handiwork for most of the evening, waiting for that sublime moment when you quit jacking with the tree and walk away in defeat, seeking counseling and hopefully prescription tranquilizers. Once you leave the room, the cat will leap on the tree, claw its way to the top, chew off the top third of the tree, and then knock the rest of it over for you to find in the morning when all you really wanted to find was a bagel and some coffee….

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