This Is One Big-Ash Wednesday!

Here it is Ash Wednesday, the day whereupon I traditionally sit on my ash and crank out some sort of Easter blog–and by ‘traditionally’ I mean one year in a row.  Easter is a special time at our house and we celebrate the resurrection of The Christ by consuming gluttonous amounts of ham, a cloven-hoofed delicacy that ironically Jesus himself never ate because, as it reads in Leviticus, The Queen Mother’s Dijon-pineapple glaze is positively sinful.

Easter for me is a source of pleasant memories, not the least of which is coloring eggs as a child and waking up Easter morning to search for them around the house, as they were purportedly scattered about by some sort of mischievous long-eared rodent.  A related memory is waking up a few days later to the sulfurous smell of the one or two that we overlooked.

A few years ago I created a more adult-type memory Continue reading

My Shopping’s Done. You?

Pardon me while I wax nostalgic such that it’s all shiny and the water on it bubbles up to where you could use it to wrap fragile mailings, but Christmas just isn’t what it used to be.  It probably has something to do with my considerable and snowballing oldness and its accompanying cantankerous irritability.  Get off my lawn, by the way.

When you’re a kid every Christmas is like, well…Christmas.  It was an enchanted time of sugarplums and fairies and sugarplum fairies and more sugar but not quite so many fairies.  They were days of innocence in which an infant could travel to grandma’s in the back window of an LTD and if you sat too close to the fire in your PJ’s they would melt right onto your skin.  It was back when it was perfectly safe to drape a month-old, dried-out evergreen tree in the same red-hot incandescent light bulbs we used in toy ovens to bake tasty treats. Continue reading

‘Tis the Season…Or Not

Hark!  My Uncle Harold is singing, merry gentlemen are resting, and everywhere you look, gay yuletides!  This can only mean one thing: ‘tis the season to leave the ‘i’ off ‘it is’ and shamelessly throw around tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy.

Therefore in the spirit of joviality and good cheer, I would personally like to take this unique opportunity to don my red hat, roll up my Greensleeves, and wish you and yours all the generic goodness and generally pleasant emotive responses that customarily accompany the festival of your chosen religious tradition coinciding with the sun’s winter solstice! Continue reading