Art, I suggest a new holiday or dressing up an old one! That way you're not all jammed up with the whole Christmas debacle. Like Festivus on the "Seinfeld" sitcom perhaps.

Personally I like the idea of making Ground Hog Day the big yearly event. Gifts can be purchased really cheap in the post-Christmas shopping days and we can establish similar customs to help satisfy the folks who say they'll miss Christmas. Ground Hog Day can be totally secular as well so we can invite all people to shitcan their own wacko celebrations (like Christmas) and join up.

We can go out and pick out the best hole and then bring it home to our living room. Decorating the hole can be a family tradition as well as decorating the outside of our homes with various size dirt mounds lit with sunlamps......very festive! Before bed we can all hang our underwear over the fireplace. Then on the day itself we can all awaken to presents around the hole and our underwear filled up by Willie Whistlepig himself as he visits the homes of the faithful in his Radio Flyer wagon filled with gifts and pulled by a dozen naked mole rats. Great fun!!!!! Isn't this exciting?


Or you can just go on and take all the info others have given you and try to get out that stuff before Christmas if that's how you feel about it..........................***sigh***..............

Spaw