On my way home from the grocery store, after I called my son to excitedly tell him about the new donut shop that just opened next to the pharmacy, I caught site of the man beside the road. He was wrestling with a strand of blue LED Christmas lights. I have seen this guy putting up his lights before. The first time, probably three years ago, a little boy was assisting him. The second time there was a younger woman, as I recall. Now it was just him and a dog. What are the odds of seeing the same man putting up the same lights for three years in a row?

The tree was a Charlie Brown job leaning achingly to the west, limbs all knobby like an old man bowling. It was hardly the kind of tree that deserved decorating. As I passed, I noticed he was struggling a little to reach the higher limbs so I drove down to the intersection, pulled a uie and went back, pulling up in front of his house. I could tell it sort of scared him from his defensive motion, as if he thought I might be there to rob him of his festive LED’s. I have done a few things I am not proud of, but stealing Christmas lights from an old man decorating a tree in his front yard is not one of them.

The dog, a brown female mixture of at least three breeds I recognized, positioned herself between the man and me. She did not bark, her ears up, her tail straight, her eyes fixed on mine. She looked friendly, just weary, not unlike the old man, not unlike me on this particular day.

“Hi there,” I said in a way that I hoped would diffuse the oddness of my actions. “I know this is going to sound strange, but I’ve seen you do this for about three years and since these were the first LED lights I had ever seen back then, and you are still putting them on this tree –”

I could tell he was getting nervous that my introduction was taking so long.

“I kind of thought you looked like you could use some help,” I said quickly to get it out.

He stared at me like I was from the tax assessor’s office. “I ain’t following?” he said.

Awkwardness filled the space between him, the dog and me.

“Sir, a lot of people have been mighty kind to me and my family in the last month or so,” I said, thinking about the last six weeks of sitting in a chair, staring at monitors and tubes and wires connected to the fragile girl struggling to breathe under the sheets, wondering what would happen in the next hour that would change my life forever. I pinched the thought from my mind. He did not even know me. To him, I was the strangest stranger in the world.

“People have shown us more care and love than I ever figured I was owed. Saw you here, the lights, the tree, and thought I would pay it forward.”

From the confused look on his face I could tell he had not seen the movie. I tried to make my offer clearer.

“If you need some help putting these lights up, I’d be happy to give you a hand,” I said, feeling like I should have just kept going, admiring his scraggly, blue LED-lighted tree from afar.

Reluctance or reservation or just plain old remembering ran across his face. He looked at me. He looked at the tree. He looked down at his hands holding the strand and he nodded slowly. I took a step forward. He shook his head, squeezing a tiny branch between his calloused fingers.

“No. I appreciate you stopping by to help me, I really do,” he said. “But this is a little job I do by myself. My grandson and I planted this tree. It ain’t much, as you can see. Thought Irene was going to take it down. It’s still here, though.”

He paused, looking down at the dog.

“And as long as it’s here and I’m here, I’m going to keep putting these blue lights on it.” He smiled, draping some over a limb.

“He’s been gone a year now. Would have been seven.”

The words caught in his throat. I looked toward my car. I should never have stopped. It was more than I wanted to know. And yet saying the words out loud seemed to brace him.

“He liked these better than the red ones. ‘Blue Christmas’ he called them.”

It seemed like the old man was going to say something else, but he did not. He was finished talking. It was getting dark. A November breeze rustled the tree. The smell of a distant fireplace made the jostling lights seem even more like Christmas. I did not ask any more details. He did not offer. His details were probably not too different than mine.

Driving away, I thought about my little girl many years ago, her face illuminated by Christmas lights, her big buck-tooth grin pushing her cheeks into squinty eyes looking into the sky wondering if Santa was up there somewhere, heading this way, bringing something good.

I have strange dreams around holidays. The one about Santa and a family of elf zombies kept me freaked for days. The pumpkins and nuns dream still bothers me on Halloween. My most recent dream fits today’s holiday if you live in certain parts of the country where Thanksgiving parades are not sponsored by Macy’s, but do involve flatbed trucks decorated with paper mache and waving girls in some stage of winning a beauty pageant. I say this not to make fun of any regional group, mind you, but to prove that I have, indeed, decorated such a float and dated such a waving girl, and I figured this experience gives me a small amount of credibility on the subject.

In my dream I was on one of these floats wearing a camo’d pilgrim hat, a big belt buckle and – here’s the weird part, just in case you thought I had gotten to it already – I was deep-frying a cowpigdeerturducken while waving to people who looked at me as if I had either given a large contribution to the First Baptist Church or stolen that very same thing. Strange, not going to lie.

The dream sort of hung around for my morning Coke and Pop Tart and I almost told my wife, but thought better of it since she was busy with our own bird and already wonders what I dream about that makes me grunt and yodel now and then. It has bothered me all morning, to the point that I Googled “Cowpigdeerturducken” just now.

No such animal combo on the Internet. Zip. That is how dreams work. They mess with you at night with un-invented things even Google cannot find just so you will spend some of your day trying to understand a way to justify their unconscious stupidity.

Then again, in a Bass-Pro-Shopped world of Cajun marinade injectors and ten-gallon deep fryers, why has no Bubba ever tried to create the ultimate redneck feasty beast? A Cowpigdeerturducken would be a whole episode of Extreme Chef.

Finding a deep fryer big enough to do the job on a cow stuffed with a pig stuffed with a deer stuffed with a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken would really be a 50-gallon drum perched over a bonfire, and even that might not do it. In my dream it was kind of like that. The whole float was a little greasy and slippery. That much boiling oil would be a dangerous job even for Paula Deen in a fireproof NASCAR uniform, although imagining Paula Deen in that uniform is not a dream I would admit to having.

None of this really matters, though. It was just a dream brought on by a biscuit I ate too late last night. No such thing as a cowpigdeerturducken, nope, just a weird dream. Besides, Gander Mountain and Bass Pro Shops sell everything from camo’d long johns to camo’d couches, but there are no camo’d pilgrim hats in either place. I checked their websites. And not one item big enough to help a man cook a cowpigdeerturducken. Part of me says thank God and the other part wonders why no one has done it yet.

As you watch the parade this Thanksgiving morning, imagine yourself on one of those floats dressed like Larry the Cable-Pilgrim, riding beside a sloshing drum of boiling oil frying a cowpigdeerturducken puckering into a crispy critter while you wave. And my wife wonders why I grunt and yodel in my sleep.

(NOTE: Even though I could not find a cowpigderturducken or a camo’d pilgrim hat on the Internet, I found that pic up there. That is the best I could do)

How he got into the bathroom is not as much of a mystery as I would like to believe. I had let him in, not thinking about his deviousness and skills. He whined, I caved, he watched me shave. And then, while putting on my socks, I forgot he was in the bathroom.

What happened: Rudy, our Jack Russell, walked right past the security gate we have erected to keep him out of the rooms where, as my wife says “he is not welcome.” She uses that phrase for places where Rudy has done mischievous things in the past – which would be every room in the house. The list is long and usually involves him eating something or peeing on something and not always in that order. Naturally, Rudy resents this rule, and when given the chance, he does both of those things just to show his dominance over my wife’s edicts.

He was in the bathroom perhaps four minutes without my direct supervision. That’s all it took. We found the chewed-up Kleenex first, then the pee on the bed while I got a shirt from the closet – just to get even with us for something we’ve forgotten, but he remembers. My wife walked into the bathroom and there was the toothpaste. Or what had been toothpaste a few minutes before Rudy’s arrival.

This is a good time to reiterate that we try hard to protect Rudy from his doggedness, his Jack Russellian tendencies, his plain old nasty habits. Sometimes we win. Today, we lost.

It seems that after pissing on the bed and chomping the tissues, Rudy hopped on the counter, somehow unscrewed the top off the tube of Crest and used his paw to squeeze out some paste. There was very little paste in the tube, but Rudy managed to squeegee enough to make a mess. Aqua-green paw prints dotted the bathroom, his hassling breath smelling like minty fluoride. My wife was not pleased.

He was standing on one side of the room, grinning, his pearly whites one step away from a cavity, his whiskers coated in paste. My wife was on the other side waving the crumpled tube at him. He looked like he had just won the Heisman trophy. She looked like she had lost the Grammy to Taylor Swift.

She had a conversation with him as if he and she were on the same page, which they seldom are. To him, peeing on things is a sign of great respect. Not so much for her. Eating Kleenex, well, that’s just a sick twist of a Jack’s appetite for prohibited items. Considering some of the disgusting things I have seen Rudy eat, however, the toothpaste was a good move, in my opinion. And I said so. Now she is pissed at us both. Until she calms down, he is sitting in my chair while we watch bowl games. His breath smells awesome. I hear that four out of five dogs prefer Crest.

In case you haven’t noticed, there is only one very unholiday-like tune for the cold lull after Christmas, and you just heard Merle sing it. Post Christmasitis affects a lot of people.

Blurry vision may start the decent into this affliction, along with surly conversations, instantaneous hatred of fruitcake, eggnog and tins of flavored popcorn. The last two only seem to happen around this time of year.

Post Christmasitis affects the brain, butt, arms, legs, stomach and colon. Now and then it causes driveway shoveling and has been known to make your car taste really salty (for those who are into licking cars – another even worse malady).

The symptoms of Post Christmasitis vary and may even move from any of the aforementioned places to your dog, cat, mother-in-law or one of the four remote controls associated with your HDTV, causing desperate channel surfing for any programming without a holiday tune.

Victims of Post Christmasitis complain of IBS-ish pain, headaches in their ass (do the math), bloating, envy, jealousy, lumps in odd places, fear, depression, lost keys, feelings of intense football anger, ham, frequent checking of Weather.com, and laziness. Fortunately, the laziness may never go away.

Thanksgiving causes similar symptoms, but usually goes away in a day or two. Post Christmasitis hangs around like a bad neighbor until well after New Years Day, usually until the mythical college football national championship bowl game is played. It may also last until American Idol starts its crippled new season where it can be confused with StevenTylerism. That would be a really bad case that could require treatment.

There are no real cures, unless you drink. Okay, that’s a joke. Even drinking is part of the problem for many people. It makes some parts of Post Christmasitis tolerable, yet exacerbates other symptoms, like the dreaded Close-Quarters-Card-Games/Monopoly Syndrome. If you fall into this category, specialists recommend that you don’t drink more than 12 beers a day during an episode of Post Christmasitis. You may, however, stick one of those beers in a chicken’s butt for beer-in-the-rear roasting (unless you screw it up – see earlier blog post on this subject). You’ll still suffer the disease, but your house will smell awesome.

Basically Post Christmasitis is unavoidable for about 93% of Americans celebrating the holidays. The other 7% just continue to pretend it is still Christmas. These people are easy to spot. They have a handful of 20% off coupons to Bed Bath & Beyond where they will be buying up the leftover jars of Yankee Candle Christmas Cookies.

Feliz Post Navidad.

A while back, our notorious Jack Russell, Rudy (http://twitter.com/Rudythejack), was injured and laid up in bad shape for several weeks. Here he is, back to his snarly self on Christmas Eve, with one of the many gifts from his friends. Rudy’s recovery is the best gift we could get.

Think about the gifts you got this year that will not fit in a box and came with no ribbon. Ours has four legs and is carrying around a rawhide bone the size of a “Shake Weight.”

Merry Christmas.

South Alabama, between Mobile and Dothan and north of Pensacola, is a rural place filled with deer, rabbits, alligators, foxes, squirrels, bobcats, panthers and even an off-course bear or two. There are no reindeer. Not officially. This fact never stopped my uncle from hunting them.

“This year I’m gonna get me one of them reindeers,” he would say.

My cousins and I would cry. We only saw reindeer as cute characters with weird names hooked up to Santa’s sleigh. It never occurred to us that anyone would hunt one. But when the weather turned cold, my uncle would start in with boasts of “baggin ol’ Rudolph.” I knew he would not stop there. He’d take out Dasher, Dancer, Donder, Blitzen – the whole song-full. It scared the hell out of us.

Every time he would go off at 3 A.M., toting that 12-gauge, we just knew he would come back dragging one of our beloved reindeer. He never did.

Years later, I realized that he was just messing with us kids. He never intended to kill Rudolph or any other reindeer. But he got a twisted kick out of our worrying about it.

When he was an old man, invalid and dying, he pulled me aside and whispered, “You know there ain’t no reindeers down here, don’t you?”

I nodded that I did know.

“They’re all out in Los Angeles,” he said. “makin’ TV shows.” Through the pain of cancer, he grudged a smile.

On his dying day, he was still messing with us kids.

Merry Christmas

Saturday shoppers strut through Tyson’s Corner mall. Christmas is in two weeks. You can see the building stress in their faces. The line for Santa is long and coughing and features a juggling elf amid a gauntlet of snotty sleeves and yawning parents. On Santa’s knee, a full-grown man and woman straddle the jolly old codger as he pretends they don’t weight 230 pounds each. His cheeks are rosy more from hypertension than joy.

At the food court, across from the Cinnabon, sushi rides a conveyor belt beside people who can’t use chopsticks. Sushi and cinnamon rolls probably should not be for sale this close, but that’s just me.

Playing cards spin in the air between the magic hands of a guy who not only can spin a dime in mid air, he can throw down some spin that almost makes me want to buy the $50 magic trick in the cool box. Then I remember that I don’t really like magic all that much.

About 3 P.M., I am tired and thirsty and buy a strawberry lemonade chiller from a fast food joint across from a row of massage chairs. “$1 for 3 minutes.” That’s a cheap massage. I inspect the chair. Seems legit, very sturdy, nice leather, solid construction. I go with it. Besides, I could use 3 minutes of even cheap rubbing after walking for three hours, so I settle in and feed my buck through the slot. The chair comes to life, rollers gouging and prodding my aching back and shoulders. Pressure pads constrict around my calves. Just when I am caught in the chair’s full grasp, another movement starts up, and not in a place I want massaged while sitting in the middle of thousands of people as Taylor Swift’s “Santa Baby” echoes past L’Occitane en Provence, Build-A-Bear Workshop and Godiva.

At this point, let me say that I have sat in my share of massage chairs (mostly at Sharper Image and Brookstone). I have had several serious massages over the years by experts, some using their feet. So I have the massage thing down. I get it. This is not it.

As the rollers drop down into a relaxing lumbar motion, what feels like a pool ball attached to the end of a broom handle begins to ascend from the middle of the seat. It is a bit weird at first. When it does not stop rising, I get concerned. When it gets to full-on prostate exam mode, I panic. My strawberry lemonade ends up on the floor. But my legs are trapped. The pool ball digs in like Hell Boy is head-butting me in the ass.

Is this a joke? Is there a camera videoing this for MTV? I am on my elbows, up off the seat trying to wiggle out of the thing’s way. Finally it eases off and drops back into the seat and I jump up. What the hell? I look around and another guy is sitting down in the chair beside me. He shakes his head and feed in $10 for 30 minutes.

“Man, I could use this,” he grunts to no one in particular.

I back away from him and the chair, un-tucking my massage wedgie. If a dollar gets you 3 minutes of the pool-ball-in-the-back-pocket treatment, what will $10 get you for 30 minutes? I refuse to imagine it. Walking through the crowd I glance back. The man is gone. It hasn’t been two minutes. The chair is rocking and rolling like the sick machine George Clooney constructed in the movie “Burn After Reading.”

And I always thought the Christmas goose was served on a plate.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETSWLFWPhqQ

Let’s all gather around the fake tree – the tattered Tannenbaum that no one will want to take down in January – and pretend we can’t wait to watch “A Christmas Story” for 24 straight hours on tbs. Fah-ra-ra-ra-ra.

It’s that time of year, when people stress out over their obligations to attend endless holiday traditions. A cursory glance at any local publication will reveal a festive season filled with so many freaking festive festivities that the Trans-Siberian Orchestra could barely hold a pyrotechnic laser beam to it.

How many festive open houses and festive holiday tours of festive decorated homes and mansions and historic landmarks can a person endure in three festive weeks?

How much spiked eggnog does it take to withstand another presentation of “The Nutcracker” or “Amahl and the Night Visitors” and God forbid your kid gets the part of a rapping Scrooge in the new drama teacher’s hip version of “A Christmas Carol.”  Has anyone ever not slept through “Handel’s Messiah?” Really? Bite me, Cousin Eddie.

What is the new holiday tradition this year? Flashing Santa. Yeah, Jerry Springer style. Then there is the “Ms. Santa Lingerie Fest.” And you can’t have your Christmas cookies without the pushed-up, wing-sprouting, Victoria’s Secret Christmas Fashion Show. No wonder the old fat man is so damned jolly.

There are so many Christmas parades the cops must be ready to pull out the 9 mm and uncork a six pack into Santa and his band of festive trolls waving to freezing families and hucksters selling inflatable candy canes and white, fuzzy-balled caps. Tensions run especially high at these parades. Do not pretend you have never elbowed a little kid so you could snap a shot of your old high school band playing “Deck The Halls.” I saw you do it.

Yesterday, in downtown Richmond, an angry guy with his sullen family struggled for a place beside Broad Street while and angry woman with senior citizen parents hogged the sidewalk, blocking his view. He finally yelled, “Go F#@! yourself!” His F-word was not “festive.” Nor was her response.

Of course every town has its own version of a tacky light tour where people who bitch about their electric bill all year try to max out the meter in one month while others who bitch about traffic all year happily endure snarls just to see an inflatable Santa swell up next to Rudolph humping a snowman out by the mailbox.

Just when you thought you had…oh, wait I have to go. Chevy Case is about to utter the most festive of holiday sermons from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation:

“Hey. If any of you are looking for any last-minute gift ideas for me, I have one. I’d like Frank Shirley, my boss, right here tonight. I want him brought from his happy holiday slumber over there on Melody Lane with all the other rich people and I want him brought right here…with a big ribbon on his head! And I want to look him straight in the eye, and I want to tell him what a cheap, lying, no-good, rotten, four-flushing, low-life, snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, blood-sucking, dog-kissing, brainless, dickless, hopeless, heartless, fat-ass, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, worm-headed sack of monkey shit he is! Hallelujah! Holy shit! Where’s the Tylenol?”

5:24 am, Black Friday, checkout line, a crowded Walmart near Richmond, Virginia.
People throng like bleary-eyed zombies to get an early bird grip on items like a Ronco Rocker Showtime Stainless Steel Stamped 20-piece knife set for only $20.

“That’s a buck per knife,” says the grizzled man standing next to his wife who holds a Nintendo DSi XL Value Bundle which she proudly claims “was $219, but I’m getting it for $189.”

Several of these desperate shoppers have camped out on the sidewalk and expect preferential treatment for their suffering. Some get it. Some, however, bitch and moan that their favorite item is already gone.

“They ain’t got no more!” a man says sternly to his wife. “Don’t be lookin’ at me like that! I tried, dammit!”

She looks at him as if he is on Jerry Springer admitting to screwing her sister and her brother.

A woman, barely five-feet tall grunts, tugging a cart carrying a huge box loaded down with a Step2 Party Kitchen that “encourages creativity and role-play” and “5 electronic features” of an undetermined nature. She is sweating in a puffy coat. Behind her is a woman with a cart stacked with clothes topped precariously by two Faded Glory jackets, “Got ‘em for $18 a piece,” she smiles through clinched teeth. Her lip is a little swollen like she may have had a scuffle getting it all.

The stress can hardly be cut with a Black & Decker Power Tool Junior Workshop & Toy Chainsaw (for only $70, “Warning: choking hazard”). Toys are big this morning.

A father waits impatiently with a Radio Flyer Big Flyer tricycle featuring “performance grip tread.” He looks around wide-eyed and possibly still a little drunk. “I gotta get this and go to Best Buy,” he says to no one in particular. After more talking to himself I see his cell phone headset. His wife is on the other end yelling instructions. He nods as if she can see him. “Shit, baby, I’m doing all I can!” he growls. I think of Scotty in the old Star Trek shows pleading with Kirk, “I’m givin it all she’s got, captain!”

One thing is clear here: women run the Black Friday shopping show. Guys just do what they’re told, and badly from the looks of it.

Then I see him, a pathetic, lone male shopper. He has no female companion to scold him for his lack of purchasing skills. He is standing in a long line carrying nothing but a bag of charcoal. Damn, I think. Must have been a hell-of-a price on charcoal. He should have been out looking for a woman.

Thanksgiving is built around the idea of being thankful, and that premise worked right up until I ripped open the plastic sheathing on our fresh bird to find something truly foul. Eating turkey on Thanksgiving this year will be difficult.

After spending a couple of hours concocting a brine gathered from several Google searches, I pulled the turkey from the fridge and sat it in the sink, my big brining bag covering the counter, waiting. The knife opened Pandora’s bird bag. Dear god. The smell could have cleared out a portable toilet in August.

My eyes watered as I stupidly fondled the disgusting bird-gone-bad, shoving my hand into the body cavity and examining it in a stupor of bacterial confusion.

Having grown up near chicken and turkey houses, I know every nuanced smell that blooms downwind of a barn, but even those stinks could not stand up to this aroma of rotting flesh. I’ve seen my share of dead animals on the farm, too. This gobbler was a dead animal of the first order – and, for some unexplainable reason, I was wearing the damned thing like a glove, as if I could investigate the stink off of it. I failed.

My wife choked, my son flinched, our dog, Rudy, eyed it like a prize until his eyes began to water. No words could describe the stench of what would have been our Thanksgiving dinner. No way was I getting near the brining bag with this turkey. If I had combined its filthy carcass with the brining ingredients, physicists, chemists and biologists wondering how a turkey could level an entire neighborhood would probably be studying the resulting chemical and biological reaction for years. I could not face it.

I tossed it back in the bag and washed my hands with Clorox and rushed the turkey back to the grocery store and delivered it to customer service. Their response was no different than ours – horror. The smell followed us like a 350-pound man’s fart. People at the checkout line gagged and customer service rushed the putrid corpse out the door. We were quickly told to pick out another bird – just what one wants to do after being sold the spawn of Satan as a meal. So we did the only think a person can do on Thanksgiving: we took another turkey and hoped by Thanksgiving night we would still have something to be thankful for. So far, so good.