"Refill your eggnog for you? Get you something to eat? Drive you out to the middle of nowhere, leave you for dead?"- Clark Christmas Vacation

The Boy, after having had a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Past, finds himself embroiled in the “who broke the tree” scandal of 2005.

The Mrs. has not one, but two tires with slow leaks on her car. That doesn’t bother me overly much, since I don’t drive her car, and the last time I checked The Mrs. has two good legs and can walk. Seems to bother her a might more.

I could have taken the easy way out and had the tires repaired, but upon further inspection the amount of tread left on these tires isn’t really measureable by tools that exist outside of certain government laboratories buried deep under huge mountains where they’re working on a race of cyborg-coyotes to keep the sheep population under control.

Rather than spend the (I’m guessing) three hundred bucks or so on a couple of tires for The Mrs., I had a perfectly good set of tires waiting in the garage. Snow tires. Metal-studded snow tires.

Studded snow tires are probably illegal in Texas year-round, though (through careful Internet search, consisting of me remembering a rule that was once true – which is way lazier than actually looking it up) they are legal in Colorado year-round. Not that it matters, since, to quote one of The Mrs. favorite movies, snow tires in Texas are “like television on a honeymoon. Unnecessary.” The bright side is that the local cops would probably not even know that they’re illegal, but The Mrs. would give me hell if she got a ticket.

Me? I have a set of needle nose pliers.

Do you have ANY idea how many studs are in a snow tire? 116 was what The Boy counted. It took me seven minutes to get the first one out, and about fifteen for the next seven. After a while, I got good at it and could get a few a minute, if you ignored the whole “bleeding blister in the palm of your hand” thing. I finished two in about an hour and a half, and (since we lived in Alaska where we used the darn things nine months of the year) the snow tires are already mounted. On the good rims.

Now what exactly do I do with 232 metal studs?

Okay, now for some Christmas-y thoughts:


A Brief History of Christmas
as submitted by
John I. Wilder
in partial fulfillment of
English 9


So, what is Christmas? To many, Christmas is a day spent with bad hair from getting up so early so that they young children could rip and tear wrapping paper like rabid wolverines on a pork roast, and then fall over in a toy-coma. To the Romans (the Romans were a nation of people who invented bread like Roman Meal®, pizzas, and spoke with English accents) Christmas was known as the great hangover, since December 25 marked the day after their big party, Saturnalia. Why they named their big party after a car produced by GM and aimed at single women is a mystery lost to the ages.

While we may think that modern people like Britney Spears have taken partying to the absolute ultimate possible, the Romans would have kicked her out of their parties for being a wet blanket and keeping her knickers on too long, and for the whole “cutting off all her hair” thing. Romans knew how to party, since they also invented “dancing on the table with a lampshade on your head” which would have been impossible without the Romans because they also invented the lampshade and the table. And dancing, which if you ever saw “Footloose” is just evil, primarily because of Kevin Bacon.

Saturnalia involved a whole week of revelry, where many a table was trod upon, and many a patrician was cited for CUI (charioteering under the influence). At the end of this holiday was the next big holiday, the celebration of Sol Invictus (Latin for Salt Lake City).

The celebration of Sol Invictus was on December 25, and again probably involved a lot more drinking, dancing, and other naughty stuff, like cheating on your taxes.

This all stayed the same until 1813 when people looked around and saw that it had been over a thousand years since anybody had even seen a Roman. Everybody figured they were finally safe, and decided to stop celebrating Sol Invictus, since Salt Lake City hadn’t even been found by Lewis and Clark yet.

An entrepreneur named Dillards Von Walmart then decided that if he had a catchy enough gimmick, he could turn the whole Sol Invictus day into a shopping bonanza. After attempting the celebrations of Zoroaster, Crom and Mithra, in addition to having a ludicrous name, Dillards found himself nearly broke. That left only the Christians. Von Walmart decided to name the new holiday “Christmas.”

Supported in popular culture by a poem (“A Visit from Texas Chainsaw St. Nicholas”) Dillards Von Walmart and his hunting buddy, Eddie Bauer-Macy, had hit a goldmine when they started selling Action St. Nicholas (with extra chainsaw gore action). The next year, shoppers were lined up around the corner attempting to purchase inexpensive brass knick-knacks from China. The only missing part to the our modern-day celebration of Christmas was Santa Claus, who, as we all know, is a transdimensional being that eats the souls of small children.

Hmmm, wonder why I didn’t get an A on that paper?

Regardless, Merry Christmas to all!