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 →