Pass the Pepto
Writing a column around the holidays is difficult. I mean, by the time you read this, Thanksgiving will be three days in the rear-view mirror and you’ll probably be just getting out of the hospital with that food poisoning issue. Again, I apologize for that bad business. I truly thought those things were yams.

What’s so sweet about it?
And what’s the deal with you weirdos who just love sweet potatoes? Me, I won’t go near the stuff. Call me crazy, but anything with innards the color of a traffic cone and I’m steering clear. To me, sweet potatoes look like the result of a nuclear accident.

You put it where?
I like stuffing all right, but when you think about how it is presented, it’s pretty disgusting stuff. If pressed on the matter, I would say that stuffing comes from anatomically questionable sources.

Trypto-fan
I don’t know if I believe that hoo-haw about Thanksgiving turkey containing some magical elixir of sleepiness that transforms all holiday diners into sofa-lounging lay-abouts prone to drooling and snoring. It sounds like a pseudo-scientific reason offered up to explain away our natural laziness. Anyway, in my household, my mother always sprinkled the Thanksgiving potatoes with Ambien, so it was a moot point.

Ped-Xing
The other night, at about 11 p.m. on a very quiet street, I saw a young lady standing in front of one of those traffic control buttons while trying to get across the intersection. There wasn’t a car in sight, but the lady kept jamming that button anyway and she just stood there waiting for the symbol to change from a bright orange hand (the color of yams, now that I think about it) to a symbol indicating that it was safe to cross the street. Watching her, I couldn’t decide if I admired her commitment to self-preservation or if I derided her as a mindless drone completely dependent on some brainless machine to dictate her own sense of safety. I also wondered why the pedestrian symbols on those signs have neither hands nor feet.

Snowstorm coming tonight
That was a headline in Tuesday’s Sun Journal. Clearly that’s a mistake. It can’t snow yet, I don’t even know where my shovels are. My hammock is still hanging in the backyard, for God’s sake, and my summertime toys are strewn all over the lawn. My philosophical approach to looming winter can best be described as “charmingly optimistic bordering on the utterly stupid.”

Hallowmasgiving?
And now we find ourselves in that dead zone between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s a magical time of year where on any given street, you might find a rich blend of three different holidays. In one yard, you’ll still find a 20-foot skeleton towering over the street as the leftovers of some dude’s Halloween decor. Next door, you’ll see that the Christmas lights have already gone up (blech), while two houses down can be seen some truly unhappy fellow vomiting in the shrubbery because the poor soul was fool enough to eat those things I thought were yams. Again, I apologize.

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