Trimming Traditions

By Emily Chase

Celebration of Christmas demands that we maintain certain family traditions year after year. Some traditions satisfy the desires of eager children, while others protect exhausted parents. Here are five easy suggestions for trimming those traditions to fit the current season.

Decorating the house is the first challenge of the season. Stores begin decorating their shelves before Halloween so why not follow their example and get an early start? Combine Halloween costumes with Christmas themes and have your kids dress up as a Christmas wreath or an oversized Christmas stocking. When they come home, just have them hang the costume on the front door or over the fireplace mantel. Your neighbors have helpfully filled the stocking with candy treats so you can cross that chore off your list too.

Have you accumulated a mountain of cardboard cutouts covered with macaroni and glitter that your kids made in preschool? Your children are now in high school, and your family tree is beginning to look like more a bulletin board covered with post it notes. Start a new tradition. Recycle those ornaments! Have your children write notes on the back and send them to their former teachers as greeting cards. Think of the joy the teachers will experience knowing the child that emptied the entire bottle of glitter into the fruit punch still remembers them.

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Welcome To Perry, Illinois… Population: 12

By Darren Marlar

I was on my way home from a comedy gig in southern Illinois when my GPS suddenly lost power. I had no idea how much I relied on “Imogene” until she abruptly decided to give me the silent treatment. (I named my GPS Imogene because that’s my mother-in-law’s name and she also likes to tell me where to go.)

I was stuck with a farmer’s soybean field on one side of me, and on the other side… uh… oh, look at that… more soybeans! I looked for a map, or an atlas. Nothing. I pulled out my laptop computer to log on to MapQuest… still nothing. Apparently soybean farmers don’t have much of a need to set up Wi-Fi for their tractors and silos. Sure, the horses, cows, and chickens would probably love visiting websites about animals, but without opposable thumbs, it’d be difficult to type “w-w-w-dot-my-animal-genealogy-dot-com.”

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Christmas Shopping—Bah, Humbug!

By Kathi Macias

I am not a shopper. Seriously! Shopping—particularly Christmas shopping—is right up there at the top of my “despised things to do” list, right along with root canals and skydiving. (Okay, I’ve never actually experienced skydiving, but I promise you I’d hate it. I mean, you don’t have to get set on fire to know you don’t want to be a human torch, am I right?)

The worst thing about shopping is that you really can’t get out of it. When I was a kid, Mom used to drag me and my two younger brothers along on the bus just so we could trudge up and down Main Street and plod in and out of every store along the way. (That was before shopping malls, if you can imagine that!) My feet would hurt, I was mad because I wanted to be home reading a book, and worst of all I had to “keep an eye on” my two little brothers. Oh, that was fun! While Mom pawed through piles of sweaters and socks and underwear—none of which we kids had the least interest in receiving as gifts—I halfheartedly tried to keep my brothers from getting into trouble. They, on the other hand, were completely devoted to finding some new and innovative way of disrupting the entire shopping event. Of course, as I stood there bemoaning my fate and feeling absolutely wretched over the entire state of affairs, it never occurred to me that it wasn’t exactly a walk in the park for my mom; somehow I was under the illusion that she actually enjoyed it!

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“Baby Steps”

By Kathi Macias

“What About Bob?” has to be one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. I’ve laughed my way through it many times, which is highly unusual for me, as it’s a rare film that holds my interest more than once. I’ve asked myself what it is about that movie that intrigues me—beyond the obvious, which is that it’s a story about an over-the-edge neurotic who carries his goldfish in a water pouch around his neck and endears himself to his therapist’s family through his eccentric but winsome ways, even as he infuriates the therapist himself and eventually drives him over the edge. As humorous as that is, the most memorable part of the movie is a simple two-word phrase: “baby steps.”

When Bob learns his therapist is going on vacation and won’t be able to see him for a while, the poor man is panic-stricken. He informs the doctor that he simply cannot function that long without him, so the therapist advises him not to be overwhelmed by the situation but to approach it with “baby steps.” We then see Bob proceeding through the movie, reminding himself at every juncture: “Baby steps, baby steps, baby steps….”

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Thanksgiving…Again?

By Kathi Macias

Didn’t we just do Thanksgiving? It couldn’t possibly have been a year since the last one because I promised myself I was going to lose those extra turkey-and-mashed-potatoes pounds but…I haven’t! How can that be?

Seriously, when I was young I could lose ten pounds by skipping lunch for a few days. Now? Turkeys follow me around laughing. They know they’re not the only ones who are going to pay the price for this calorie-laden holiday.

I remember Thanksgiving when we were kids, when my mom started baking on Monday for Thursday’s feast. She was so busy preparing for the big day that she forgot we still had to eat until then. Between Sunday and Thursday of Thanksgiving week, we survived on dry cereal and cold hot dogs.

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