"My first letter of rejection, and I haven't even started my novel yet." - The Tick, The Tick

 

The Boy, opening Christmas presents last year with his shadow.

At Christmastime since the invention of the Xerxes® machine by the Greek philosopher Plato Edison in 1843, it has become a holiday tradition that friends send out a general letter with their Christmas card. The letter usually tells what happened to them and their family in the preceding year.

As a rule, they leave out the really good stuff like, “Sharon and I were drinking heavily and got into a fistfight and the cops showed up while we were attempting to recreate the Spock-Kirk duel on the planet Vulcan scene from the episode Amok Time using a lawn edger and a claw hammer as weapons while clad only in mud covered underwear in our front yard. It was the best day ever.”

Instead you get little snippets and outtakes of the life that the family had, omitting most tragedy but bringing you up to date on what’s happened in the lives of their family. But, you already knew most of that stuff since you called them after you got into a drunken reenactment of an A-Team fight between Mr. T and Murdock and some Amish people that were in danger of being held hostage by rich industrialists with your uncle because he was hogging the Cheetos™.

As a general rule, I like getting those letters – little press releases from friends far away.

Also, as a general rule, The Mrs. and I haven’t written Christmas cards and sent any out since, oh, 1997. If you’re still waiting for the ’98 card, don’t give up hope. I bought them on sale at Wal-Mart® after Christmas in 1997 (cards are super cheap then), and they’ve been packed somewhere since before I moved to Alaska. Note that I live in Houston now. One day I might actually find them, and become organized enough to send a note out.

For now, the Intrawebs will have to do to serve the same purpose. The nice thing is that it doesn’t cost all that much (after the computer, the cable Internet connection, the electricity to power the computer, the computer desk, etc.) to send one out. It’s nearly free!!!

I’ve never written one of those letters, but I thought, Intertubes, that you deserved my best shot, so, here it is:

In January The Mrs. and I almost saw something cold, but it turned out to be condensation on the exterior of a beer can. This was reported in the local news as the “Great Houston Ice Storm of 2007.”

In February, I made national news when an astronaut allegedly drove from Houston to Florida to “have a talk with” The Mrs. The Mrs., thankfully, was in Houston. Is the astronaut in trouble? Depends.

In March, we spun ourselves into cocoons so we could hurry and do the whole chrysalis thing and get to April and pay taxes. In April, we paid taxes. Yay, taxes!

In May, The Boy got out of school. We got a note of thanks and good luck wishes from the teacher, and then she promptly retired. She is 22.

In June, I discovered that The Mrs. gets bit cranky (and sweaty) when the air conditioner breaks. I could not really understand her pain from the office. Complainers always bug me. It was only out for a month, sheesh. (This is an Actual Fact®, not a Made Up Fact like most of mine.) I also had The Medical Exam That Dare Not Speak Its Name, and was thence banished from beer for a month.

In July, August, and September, we just sweated and powerwashed various things, except that during August, our skin melted. The Boy also figured out how to transmute his horrible bad credit (it seems he bought 14,403,200 homes in Southern California at an average price of $695,000 on an allowance of $4.00 a month, but the variable intrest rate really suckered him into thinking it was a good deal) into a fifteen billion dollar Federal Reserve Bank bailout that will make him nearly as rich as Vladimir Putin's maid.

In October, we still sweated, but were tired of powerwashing.

In November it was announced that I was first runner-up in the Nobel Peace Prize thingy. If Al Gore gets drunk or they find nude pictures of him (it would be more likely to find those pictures of Bill, sadly), I am expected to continue on with his duties (PowerPoint® presentations – I’m such a wizard with the clicky thing) for the remainder of his term. My PowerPoint© presentation is titled “An Inconvenient Paris Hilton.”

Okay, now you see why I don’t write those letters. But I like getting them, especially if you’ll throw in those juicy tidbits about how your Mother-In-Law threw mashed potatoes at and then disowned your husband because he refused to turn off the lights when he left the room.

Yeah. Those are the parts I want to read.

Happy Pon-Farr!