Holidays can be kind of a funny situation for us writers.

On one hand, they probably seems almost like a vacation of sorts because it’s not exactly uncommon for people like me to just kind of sit back, put our feet up, and let the ideas come to us in whatever order the calendar dictates when these days make their appearances on the horizon! You know as well as I do that with Valentine’s Day coming up in less than two weeks, it won’t be long before all of those puff pieces about diamonds and chocolate and stuffed teddy bears depicting even your partner’s most mundane of interests will be popping up on every news program, paper, magazine, website, or neural implant that you use to consume your media content these days.

Heck, this column right here was almost going to be about Valentine’s Day, except that it still seemed a little early and I honestly just couldn’t come up with anything original to write about anyways…

Because that’s the thing – although the theme may be safely in the proverbial bag as we approach those predetermined days on the calendar, there’s still that pesky, little matter of actually having something new to say that you haven’t already said in a multitude of different ways over the last three consecutive years.  That’s sort of the writer’s conundrum that comes along with holidays – they never really change, and so after a while you start to realize that you can only remind guys so many ways why forgetting the biggest, most romantic day of the whole year might be somewhat critical to the overall longevity of any relationships they’re enjoying currently or even would like to see themselves enjoying in the future!

After a while if you’re not careful, you usually just end up repeating yourself, which most writers tend to want to avoid … if they have any self-respect, anyways.  I myself still have a little left – I keep it in a tiny bottle on my dresser and try to only use it sparingly, but I think there’s still a few drops left in there that I’m saving for a particularly righteous day…

Of course, some are better than others – Valentine’s Day, Labor Day, Flag Day are all kind of one-trick holidays, frankly, but we still have a few good ones to lean on throughout the year like Halloween and Christmas.  As long as women keep dressing like hookers and candy keeps being delicious, All Hallows’ Eve will always be a ripe source of material for me, and as for Christmas … why, I could probably write an entire book about nothing but hands down the awesomest time of the year, and in fact I most likely will do exactly that before too long here!

That last one might be a spoiler – do me a favor and just try to act surprised when you finally see the announcement, will ya?

That said, it may not happen often, but if the writer is so lucky and brilliant enough to find himself writing about writing about the holidays, in that case all bets are off and really, then just about everybody wins!  The reader gets to enjoy something a little different that still brushes on the holiday at hand without having to drudge through the same old, same old yet again, the writer gets to maintain the dwindling shards of his own dignity just a wee bit longer by not repeating his same, sad old jokes about Cupid and Singing Gorilla-Grams once more, and hey, that one guy who really was about to take his life into his own hands by forgetting a Valentine’s Day gift for his leading lady still gets a friendly nudge to keep him from having to learn how to go grocery shopping and pick out linens for himself all over again!

Seriously, dude – you’ve been dating for how many years now? She will kill you and the judge will consider it “an accident” if you don’t at least bring the woman home a box of wine and some flowers and maybe one of those singing fish that you mount to the wall or something.  Nothing gets the ladies in the mood quite like Big Mouth Billy Bass and his lesser-known Rivers of Romance 3-disc expansion pack!

You know what – maybe I do still have a little Valentine’s Day wisdom left in me to impart after all…

I feel like I’ve been going through sort of a renaissance lately.

…a pie renaissance, that is…

I don’t know what it is, but I guess I’ve just really been eating a lot of pies the last couples of weeks.  Some might even say a freakish, unhealthy number of pies, especially considering my recent New Years resolutions and their distinct lack of clauses regarding the consumption of delicious baked goods and even pies in general!  Mind you, I do recall something or other about “being more conscious of the things that I eat” so as to trim my bulbous waistline down below the threshold of Grimace from those old McDonald’s commercials in time for bikini season here in a few months, but nothing specifically about pies – that’s for sure!

Which is really an oversight and a shame, I’m starting to realize here because frankly, pies are delicious and I just think that the world would be a much happier place if we all spent a little more time eating pie and a little less yelling at each other … which would actually end up going hand-in-hand because at that point our mouths would so be full of pie that it would be just plain rude to argue, anyways! Think of all the global conflicts and divorce proceedings and sibling rivalries that could be undoubtedly thwarted simply with an open heart and enough pies to go around … it’s revolutionary, is what it is…

Personally, the kind of pie that I’ve just been eating up like there’s no weigh-in tomorrow is the simplicity in a shell that is the classic pudding pie – not only are they delicious and have a tendency to bring back a nostalgic quality of when my aunt used to make them special for me each year for Thanksgiving, but they’ve also got an uncanny variety of options that take up an entire shelf at the grocery store and best of all, they’re easy enough to make that I can usually whip one up in the span of a single commercial break and still be back to How I Met Your Mother without missing one iota of Barney’s crazy, playboy antics!

…that Barney, he loves the ladies…

I mean, sure, who doesn’t enjoy a nice flourless chocolate lava cake with homemade vanilla bean ice cream and a sweet caramel reduction sauce, but sometimes a guy just wants a quick and easy dessert that’s still going to taste great without having to spend hours in the kitchen slaving over a hot stove intermixed with even more hours slaving over a hot Google trying to figure out what in the heck a “caramel reduction sauce” is in the first place!  And who’s to say that you can’t get a little fancy with pudding pies like I’ve been doing lately without devoting an extra hour of kitchen time attempting to wrangle your own culinary prowess – just mix in a little whipped cream, maybe sprinkle a few Hershey’s chocolate bar shavings on top for ambiance … as they say, the pudding pieman is only limited by the pudding packets in his pantry and whether or not his wife recently used their one and only whisk without washing it afterwards…

Really, I could go on and on all day about the perfect pleasures of pudding pies and their proud place in the pantheon of delicious desserts, and if my refrigerator didn’t just *ding* to inform me that my latest culinary creation a la pudding has finally set and is now readily awaiting consumption, I just might be motivated to hang around and chat a little longer about the delicacies of assorted graham cracker crusts and the delightful nuances between chocolate and dark chocolate and, dare I even mention chocolate turtle-flavored offerings from the pudding angels (and Bill Cosby) at Jell-O Headquarters?!

Maybe we’ll just have to save that commentary for Part 2 of my Pudding Pie Special Report – Pudding + Graham Crackers = Deliciousness, but until then, show somebody you love them, or even just show yourself that you care about you by taking the 5 minutes to mix up a pie that will keep a smile on your face long after you come to terms with the fact that you’re never really going to achieve those crazy New Years resolutions that you haphazardly scribbled down on a cocktail napkin at the bar in an alcohol-motivated self-help session last month!

At least you’ll always have pudding…

I guess there’s really no delicate way for me to introduce this, so I’ll just come right out and say it – this week, I want to talk about dog farts.

For those of you with that repulsed look on your faces, maybe it’s best for the both of us if you just try back again next week, when I promise to write about unicorns or butterflies or something else just a wee bit less “intense…”

As for the rest of you, though – if you’re still around at this point, something tells me you know exactly why this needs to be discussed because frankly, what we’re talking about here is clinically one of the most horrific, disgusting, abominable odors ever to come out of a living creature’s orifice … ever!!!*

* Don’t expect to ever see this as an award category from those prudes at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show anytime soon, though…

Your dog makes them, my dog makes them – smells that have been known to evacuate buildings and lead to the filing of divorce paperwork … smells that make you envy He Who Must Not Be Named for the unintentionally beneficial deformity of not actually having a nose … smells that make you question all that is fair and just in this simple world, not to mention what in the world this dog could possibly be eating while you’re not around to build up such noxious, paralyzing fumes inside such a relatively small puppy!  We’ve tried opening windows, we’ve tried pointing fans directly at our dog’s butt in an attempt to more quickly dissipate said toxic gases … there doesn’t exist a powerful enough air freshener, not for commercial nor industrial use, that could stand a chance to combat the odors that this dog emits from her humble rear.

I honestly don’t know how the dogs can even handle it themselves!  I mean, here’s our puppy who can smell me thinking about making a sandwich from all the way across the house … you’d think with that super-powered sniffer of hers, one whiff of her own high-magnitude blast would be enough to send her into some sort of coma, the likes of which have only ever been observed by people who think that they’ve been abducted by aliens, or at the very least knock her clear off the bed and out into the living room for her to stink up another part of the house that we don’t have to sleep in 8 hours a day!

I swear, sometimes I miss the good, old days when she would just crap right there in the middle of the floor and get it over with because at least that I could bag up and throw out with the garbage…

Who knows – maybe dogs are actually immune to odors specifically that come out of one another’s butts … it would actually kinda make sense, considering how they’ve chosen to greet each other amongst so many other non-butt-sniffing options available to them.  Or maybe they just do it out of spite, you know, as a little payback for not letting them eat people food like we do and expecting them to jump around and do all sorts of special tricks just for the same kinds of “treats” that they see our fat asses scarfing down all day long without a single high-five or rollover in sight…

If there’s but one thing (…one butt thing?) to come out of this aromatic acknowledgement, however, I suppose you could cite this – it should be known far and wide that once a man welcomes a dog into his home, his beloved wife will never have any ground to give him grief whatsoever about farting in the bed ever again! Our own farts may not exactly smell like roses by any stretch of the imagination – that’s for sure, but nonetheless, they’ll never hold a candle to the room-clearing, witness-relocating fumes that our four-legged little best friends seem to be particularly fond of producing when we absolutely least expect it.

Speaking of candles, though – I guess that’s one thing that I haven’t tried yet!  So if you happen to see a small explosion off on the horizon…

I’d like to have a word with the guy who invented these little, tiny foam balls…

You’ve probably never seen them before, given that they’re typically found inside plush toys and stuffed animals and whatnot – there’s really no discernable reason why you ever would.  The people who make these things do so with the simple intent of making our teddy bears cuddlier and our Pillow Pets comfier – I’m sure if they had any idea of the colossal mess that these seemingly harmless fillers can impose on an unsuspecting home should the furry walls containing them somehow become compromised, they’d at least put some sort of warning label on the toy’s tag or something … wouldn’t they?

Wouldn’t they?!

Of course, it’s probably not really fair to hold the manufacturers responsible for the fact that our puppy is still a vicious, destructive killer when it comes to stuffed animals.  As far as I’ve been lead to understand, traditionally most children don’t play with their stuffed toys by trying to tear out their throats and violently rip out their insides within minutes of first receiving them.  And the thing is, we’ve known this for a while now, so frankly, I’m not even sure what we were thinking!

“It’ll just be five minutes of fun!” we said.

“We’ll simply clean up all of the discarded fluff when she’s done – no big deal!!” we said.

“And besides, it’s Christmas!!!” we insisted to ourselves as we picked out the oversized tropical bird that was to be the centerpiece of our puppy’s very first Christmas ever.  We dubbed him Toucan Stan, just for the sake of narrowly avoiding trademark litigation, and for the first few minutes of his puppy playtime debut, our little Cleo certainly looked like she was having a fun time stripping the lifeblood from this harmless feathered friend like he looked at her favorite bone the wrong way … and then we saw them. Teensy, tiny specs as white as snow, and having just returned from vacation in Northern Michigan seemingly as abundant as well!

Seriously, within a matter of minutes our floors looked like a scene out of a winter wonderland, as if the entire house had somehow found itself inside a gigantic snow globe.  It may even sound kinda neat to you as I’m describing it, especially considering the distinct fact that Florida really doesn’t see a whole lot of snow these days, but make no mistake about it – “neat” was the exact opposite of what this place looked like after our determined little destroyer of cleanliness got done emptying out the innards of Toucan Stan across five separate rooms…

So many little white dots anywhere and everywhere – stuck to the bottoms of our feet, nestled into the coziest areas of our bed, and at one point I even found myself washing these little foam specs out of my hair! We’d unleashed a monster by allowing our puppy to tear open this stuffed bird at the throat and rip out its innards, and long after she’d grown bored by its empty carcass and moved on to digging up more yummy rocks out in the backyard, my wife and I would still be racking our brains on how to clean up this new snow-scape cascading across our bedroom without simply up and moving to a new house altogether and just never looking back!

Although eventually we were finally able to vacuum up the majority of these microscopic culprits in a good, solid evening of vacuuming delight, still to this day I continue to find them stuck to my feet or nestled deep within furniture crevices that are apparently too deep even for our mighty vacuum cleaner to penetrate, and so it’s in this spirit that I offer my fair advice to all of you out there who might still haphazardly yourselves think that your precious puppies would love nothing more than to play with a ginormous stuffed toy big enough to tower over them like King Kong faced the city of New York in his 1933 cinematic debut of the same name, heed my warning here today because really, there’s pretty much no worse feeling in the world than finding these little, tiny foam balls on the soles of your feet and knowing that aside from learning to pee outside with the dog, there’s really not a damn thing that you can possibly do about it…

I may technically still be on that very same crazy, cross-country Christmas vacation I first wrote about last week, but what can I say … I just couldn’t fathom waiting until I got back to share some of the immense travel wisdom that I’ve garnered along the road thus far!  We’ve driven over 1,600 miles, we’ve celebrated the holidays with two different families, we’ve cleaned up plenty of puppy byproducts along the way, and through it all, these are the things that I’ve learned…

• It’s of the utmost importance to take into consideration the physical size of the presents you buy for people before your travels, lest you want to ride for hours on end with packages on your lap…and under your feet…and pretty much all around your entire person!
• Law Enforcement Officials actually prefer that you to be able to see out of the majority of your car’s windows while moving at a high rate of speed down the interstate freeways of this fine nation.
• One should never underestimate the nostalgic power of the California Raisins Claymation Christmas Special after you’ve driven 14 hours straight and just need to unwind with a mug of hot chocolate and an old, childhood favorite!
• When you put four dogs together in one house, eventually cliques will form.  It’s in your best interest to remain on their “good side” if at all possible.
• No amount of preparations, including digital photos and video and even 3d holographic rendering, could’ve prepared an eager uncle for the overwhelming adorability that his new baby niece would be bursting with from her teensy fingers all the way down to her tiny, little toes…
• Despite having been away from home for over eight years, the snow in Northern Michigan is still very, very cold!
• From the looks of many rest areas across the country, a lot of people still litter.  This actually isn’t funny at all – I was just shocked to see that there are so many jerks out there who think littering is ok.
• Christmas cookies may not be the most nutritious road trip driving snack, but if they work for Santa Claus…
• Unwrapping huge presents is all well and fun, but you’ll still need a true Christmas miracle to fit them back in the car when all’s said and done.
• Even when visiting a strange place far, far away from home, you might be spoiling your puppy just a bit too much when you allow her to drink from your own glass of water…
• It’s a mother’s unspoken rule to ensure that no one leaves the dinner table at Christmastime without going up at least two pants sizes.
• Believe it or not, there are still things far worse than puppy pee for one to have to scrub out of their carpet.  We shall not speak of their names, but just know that they do exist and be grateful for that.
• Judging by the number of plush toys and board games and fruit snacks that I got for Christmas this year, the folks that came up with Angry Birds are doing just fine.
• No matter how ridiculously freezing it may be outside, there will always be crazy people still out in the streets shooting off fireworks at 3am on New Year’s Day.
• At the end of the day, the puppy that sleeps through an entire 14-hour car trip without so much as a single whimper or bark truly is the greatest gift of all!

I know that I haven’t really been updating the blog portion of this site much recently, so I just wanted to take a moment to instead point you over to my personal blog, where I’ve been blogging about all sorts of stuff on a very regular basis, including a special advent series of holiday posts since the beginning of the month leading all the way up to Christmas Day itself tomorrow!

http://www.scottsevener.com/blog/

Be sure to check that out if you’re still looking for a little extra holiday fix aside from the holiday-oriented humor columns that I’ve been writing this month, and rest assured that once we get the final craziness of 2011 behind us, I’ve got some great plans to start sprucing things up around this website as well, which I’ll talk more about next month…

In the meantime, though, happy holidays and thanks so much for laughing along with me here in 2011 – I’m already looking forward to even more fun in 2012, and I hope that you’ll tag along with me for the ride!

Humbly Your Holiday Humor Guy,
- Scott

What do you get when you take two adults, one puppy, and roughly 350 pounds of Christmas presents, pack them all up into a compact car, and set them loose on a wild, cross-country road trip spanning 12 states and who knows how many different weather conditions in a 10-day marathon Christmas vacation extravaganza?!

I don’t have any idea, either, but we’re sure gonna find out!

I suppose you could say that the adventure I just described spawns from one of the key perks/problems with living on the other side of the country away from the rest of your family – in those few instances when you actually do want to see them, you know – birthdays, holidays, interventions – you have to travel literally all the way across heaven and earth to actually get there!  Of course, to make matters even worse, it doesn’t help that my wife and I actually both live a gajillion miles away from our most immediate of relatives who guilt us for not seeing them on a regular basis, and so thus in all fairness one whirlwind trip to spend the holidays amongst family became two cyclones before we even stepped foot outside the door…

I also mentioned that we’ll be traveling with our lovable, omnivorous puppy who might very well eat us out of car and home in the event that we spend too long waiting to fill up gas!  I’ve heard before that traveling with a puppy is kind of like traveling with a baby, mind you with the one exception that at least a baby would have the courtesy of pooping in an actual diaper. We just recently got her used to “going outside” for the third time in the last six months, so already I’m looking forward to sending all of that progress back to square one by confusing the living daylights out of her with new doors to stand by and new places that we’d prefer her not to mark.

And lest we not forget the actual drive time itself – a teeth-clenching 3,000-mile jaunt through frozen parts unknown, with one family living kind of in the north by way of West Virginia and the other living undisputedly in the arctic tundras of the north way up in Michigan!  I can’t stress enough how much I haven’t missed in the slightest traversing the icy, snow-covered roads of my hometown since that day some eight years ago when I traded in my winter boots for a pair of flip-flops and a beach towel to move down to sunny Florida where, if it ever snows down here, we’ve got a lot bigger global issues than just trying to clear out the driveway in the morning!

But pack us all in our hybrid, fuel-efficient jalopy and away we’ll go, balancing presents on our laps and begging our puppy Cleo to “just hold it until the next rest area” as we trek our way across America in search of tidings and joy with those we hold most dear … mainly because they were the first to tolerate our bad jokes growing up, anyways.  It’s a journey one would only in their right mind make for family, and even then there had better be some decent holiday goodies waiting for us at the other end of this long and dusty trail!

A pilgrimage of epic proportions, only to be repeated every couple of years, and even then only if we still happen to be on speaking terms with the lot of them (or each other even!) by the time we manage to find our way back home again…

Remember, folks – Santa may visit all of those people’s houses in a single night, but at least he does it while they’re all asleep, and he certainly doesn’t bring any pets along with him for the ride!

I’ve never met a Christmas cookie I didn’t like.

Well, I guess that’s not technically true … I actually never really cared for those Russian Teacakes that the adults always used to like while I was growing up.  They were just so dry and bland and powdery, whereas a proper Christmas cookie should be sugary and moist and filled with holiday deliciousness at every bite!  It’s kind of hard for me to get excited about a cookie that not only crumbles and makes a giant mess on the counter when I try to sneak them at 3am, but then also leaves me battling a dry mouth that can only be cured by three and a half glasses of milk and a handful of real Christmas cookies to help get the god-awful taste of bleh out of my mouth…

But other than a few bad cookies, frosted Santas and gingerbread men are just as big a part of my holiday celebrations as the HoneyBaked Ham and the succulent, sweet and sour meatballs, and every other dish that makes my mouth water at the very thought of Christmastime growing near.  I guess that sort of explains my Weeble-like physique when you consider that all of my favorite parts of the holidays are the ones that you can eat, but now is not the time for lectures and guilt and crying over yet another year of unkept promises – that’s what New Year’s is for!

In the meantime, though, we’ve got a veritable smorgasbord of baking to do – armies of gingerbread men to do a jolly baker’s every bidding, blizzards of frosted snowflakes to fill the night sky with sugary delight, and even an Old Navy-sized collection of shortbread mittens of every shape and color … you know, because sometimes our bellies could use a little warming just as much as our fingers after a particularly blustery, cold winter day!  The kitchen may end up looking like a war zone itself after eight solid days of cookie baking intensity, with flour and sugar-dusted countertops to mark where countless pounds of dough fell to cookie cutters of all shapes and sizes, but sometimes the spoils of war justify the cost … especially when sprinkles are involved…

If you were to ask me right now what my Top 5 Favorite Christmas Cookies of All-Time are, after a bit of thought and in between bites, I’d probably cite something along the yummy lines of the following:

5. Chocolate Crinkles – you might not recognize the name, but you’d know ‘em if you saw ‘em … chocolate cookies that look like they’ve been squished, then dipped in powdered sugar to ensure a delicate sweetness straight to the core!

4. Fudge-Covered Oreos – I know, it kinda takes some of the fun out of it because technically you can just buy these at the store now, but there’s still nothing better than heating up some chocolate on the stovetop and dunking a few yourself because, well, you can put a lot more chocolate on them when you make them yourself!

3. Peanut Butter Blossoms – there are plenty of varieties, from the chocolate and cherry-flavored cookies that my wife made this year to even an extra awesome pumpkin flavor that is to die for, but sometimes just classic peanut butter cookies with a Hershey’s Kiss crown is exactly what the cookie doctor ordered…

2. Gingerbread Men – the traditional holiday building material of so many houses and villages also exists in man form, and thankfully we won’t have any trouble catching him even if he does run, run, run as fast as he can!

1. Frosted Santa Cookies – don’t even bother unless you’re my Mom, for these incredible nostalgic treats from my childhood, with their fluffy, white beards and classic, red caps are like the embodiment of Christmastime bliss in every bite…

The point behind this whole column, with all of its tantalizing imagery and mouthwatering metaphor, is really pretty simple – Christmas cookies are delicious, and if you for some bizarre reason haven’t been eating one this whole time while you’ve been reading, now is the time for you to stand up, march out to that kitchen and immediately correct that oversight!  Allow my words here today to inspire your mind, body, and taste buds, because Christmastime is far too short to spend it not eating cookies…

Seriously, go now and let the sweet buttercreams and sugary sprinkles be with you!

2011 has certainly been an educational year for this puppy procuring parental unit, that’s for sure!

And if there’s one thing that my wife and I learned about our loony, yet lovable little terror on four paws, it’s simply that if sniff comes to smell, she can and will not hesitate to consume pretty much anything that she can get her greedy, little jaws around!  It’s a wonder you’re even reading this column here today … not that there’s necessarily any worry about her eating the entire Internet, mind you, but my computer, my desk, the very chair that I sit in as I pen this literary levity for your weekly enjoyment – those are all most certainly fair game for supplemental nutrition as far as Cleo the Wonder Pup is concerned…

Which leads us to this week’s dilemma because with Christmas rapidly approaching, I know that we have to come up with something for the newest little member of our clan to find under the tree, but what exactly do you get the puppy who would just as soon eat the tree itself if I hadn’t taken the necessary precautions to erect a special puppy-proof barrier around its base to keep her malicious mouth precariously at bay?!  Over the last couple of months, we’ve caught her munching on countless pairs of shoes, decorative pillows from the couch, and even parts of our bedroom wall – honestly, it’s been just about all we could do this holiday season to prevent her from eating Christmas altogether, much less think of anything that we’d voluntarily offer up to the fate of her mighty incisors and their well-documented reign of terror!

Pretty much anything “stuffed” is automatically out, on account of countless doggy toys whose innards have already been extracted brutally and without remorse in the arena that is our living room.  Chew toys are much in the same, because unlike some dogs who are more what you might consider “amused” by the magical squeakers buried within, instead I think Cleo sees them more as a challenge, taunting her bitterly with each squawk emitted from inside their fortresses of fabric or rubber.  A new bed?  Ha!  Do I even need to tell you what happened to the last two beds?!

But the more I think about it, you know, maybe it’s my approach itself that’s fundamentally flawed, considering that finding a gift that this puppy won’t eat is pretty much akin to finding a fresh snow outside my doorstep here in sunny Florida on Christmas morning!  Instead of going out of my way to find some indestructible, puppy-proof prize that likely by the laws of nature doesn’t actually even exist, perhaps the real key to finding the perfect gift for the puppy who eats everything is in giving her something that she can eat for days and days and days to her little heart’s content…

…something that has universal pooch appeal for dogs big and small…

…something so big that she won’t even be able to carry it around the house with her until she gets at least a week or two into it!

And besides, I suppose if in the worst case scenario by some bizarre turn of events Cleo doesn’t end up absolutely loving the comedically large, three-foot candy cane-shaped bone that that she’ll be discovering underneath the tree first thing on Christmas morning, as a fallback she can always just eat the equally-comedic gigantic box that it came in– she is still just a baby, you know…

That crisp smell in the air, those familiar tunes on the radio, the … err, official summons found in my mailbox…

They mean only one thing – as if scrambling to prepare for the bestest holiday of the year isn’t enough to keep a guy busy throughout the month of December, in addition yours truly is lucky enough to be called upon to fulfill his “civic duty” by means of a mandatory, non-negotiable call for jury duty!  Because really, who can think of any more festive way to get yourself in the Christmas spirit than by spending an afternoon sitting around a courthouse waiting room, bringing in a cool $15 per day with the off chance that you might get to judge someone’s fate much like no doubt Santa is already hard at work doing as we speak?!

Well actually, that’s what I assume happens because truth be told, I’ve never actually had jury duty before! I haven’t the foggiest idea quite how I’ve managed to avoid that hardened ice ball of justice this far – between a driver’s license, voter registration card, and even randomly just hanging around outside the courthouse to see “what’s up,” the powers that be have had plenty of opportunities to rob me of my daytime hours normally devoted to game shows and my stories, but nonetheless, I guess here we are and at this point I don’t necessarily think I’m out of line for saying … I don’t have a clue what to expect when I get there!

I mean, sure – a lot of people complain about jury duty and are even rumored to go to great lengths to scheme their way out of it, but at the same time … it’s Christmastime! With this time of year already filled with all of the joy and happiness that comes naturally from getting boatloads of presents and gorging ourselves on staggering volumes of fudge and candies and cookies, for all I know maybe the courts are just the festive and fun-loving type to get in on some of this holiday action, too, instead making jury duty a celebration to look forward to instead of something to fear to the point of actually considering removing my own gall bladder just to weasel my way out of it…

The more I think about it with visions of sugarplums simultaneously dancing in my head, all sorts of curiosities come to mind:

• Do they decorate the courthouse for the holidays, and if so, what song do they make the lights outside dance to?
• Will there be snacks, appetizers, or some sort of cookie exchange that I should whip up a quick batch of my famous Chocolate-Covered Gingerbread Mickeys in preparation for?
• When is the best time for me to go up and sit on the judge’s lap so that I can whisper in his ear what I want for Christmas?

And while we’re on the subject, just exactly what kinds of cases do jurors find themselves deliberating on this time of year, anyways???

Perhaps we’ll see one in which a vile grinch of a character attempts to steal Christmas, of all things, leaving all those around him with no desire to touch him even with a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole … although for what it’s worth we do eventually learn that he’s managed to turn his act around in the end to the effect that his own tiny heart grew multiple sizes larger as a result of his lessons learned…

Or maybe instead we’ll be faced with a couple of repeat offenders who continue to terrorize a young boy during their annual burglary drives, despite being regularly bashed in the face with paint cans and set on fire and all sorts of other things that would lead most ordinary criminals to retire and take up less stressful occupations like air traffic controllers or TV/VCR repairmen…

Or possibly even some sort of legal proceeding in which the accused isn’t technically even guilty of breaking the law, per se, as much as he’s just kind of an overall jerk who hordes his money and doesn’t believe in paying benefits to his hard-working employees … that is, until he’s visited in the middle of the night by a trio of spectral spinsters looking to teach the old chap a lesson by forcing him to take a good, hard look at his penny-pinching, coal-hoarding grump of a life!

So many possibilities, merry and bright in store, I’m not sure that I’ll even be able to sleep a wink this weekend in wild anticipation of this very merry holiday jury duty that the State of Florida has been so generous to stuff my stocking with this glorious Christmas season.  Then again, if all else fails, I can always just crack open another carton of eggnog, huddle in close to the fire, and sing a few of my favorite courtroom carols to help pass the time…

While the criminals out there are spiteful,
our time in the courthouse is so delightful,
And since if we bail, Santa will know,
let us go, let us go, let us go…

(…to jury duty…)