What Can Brown Do For Me?

Well, I just got off the phone with my local post office. Seems as though the package I ordered December 16th and was shipped to me on December 17th and was supposed to arrive to me on December 22nd won't get here until after Christmas. Really? You know, you could have thrown the package on the back of a truck and driven it from Nevada to Durham in that amount of time, but apparently, it hasn't arrived in Raleigh yet. According to them.

Here's the rub: the shipment tracking that I'm using to follow the status of my package? It says the package arrived in Raleigh Monday night. At 9:46 PM. But, you know, that's a fucking lie, according to the postal service. That was auto-generated by the people in California, according to the postal service.

Looks like I'll be doing all of my business through UPS and FedEx from now on. Fuckstains.

Dump on top of this frustration that I went out this morning to buy the food for the Christmas feast. Traffic was ten times worse than the crowds at Target or Kroger. Although, both places were out of fresh thyme. Who the fuck runs out of thyme?

They were probably waiting for a fresh shipment from the USPS. Cockknockers.

You know what? Fuck you, postal service. You are not stealing my fucking Christmas spirit. Where's the fucking eggnog?

So, to make me feel all warm and glowy on the inside, I'm going to talk my wife into some hot, angry sex tell you a story about my favorite time traveling for Christmas.

With my mother- and father-in-law living in South Bend, IN and my parents in the Fort Wayne area, we have, in the past, driven up to Indiana in order to celebrate the holidays. When my thirtieth birthday rolled around, we decided to head up to Indiana so that I could see my family and get drunk enough to pass out on the couch mid-sentence have delightful and intellectual conversations with some of my college buddies.

The bonus prize in all this tomfoolery? There was a six-inch snow pack on the ground in northern Indiana. We were hoping we'd be able to celebrate a white Christmas with the kids. As luck would have it, a massive bubble of warm air traveled up the Mississippi and situated itself over the lower great lakes valley that week, and as we were driving up, the snow was melting.

When we drive up, we go up through a brief slice of Virginia and up through almost the whole of West Virginia and up to Ohio, where we cut across countryside and go through Columbus and then head up 75 to Lima and cut over there to Fort Wayne and then on up to South Bend. It's a long drive. Since the kids were little, we tried to make that drive at night, so they could sleep.

Crossing into West Virginia, there was snow on the ground. By the time we got to the point where we were crossing over the breadth of Ohio, the snow was almost totally melted. It was actually warmer at three in the morning in Ohio than it had been at six o'clock in the evening in North Carolina. All the melted snow plus the rising temperatures caused things to be foggy, but not so much that it completely obscured the roads. It was sort of a heavy haze hanging over the fields and forests of the Buckeye State.

Fortunately, Ohio was one of those places where the glaciers had flattened everything out all nice and dandy. What that meant was that I could look out over the plains and see, literally, for miles, because the highway was raised slightly in relationship to the farmlands stretching out toward the horizon.

Every little farmhouse and every little homestead had their lights on that night. So, I could look out and, through the gloom of the darkest part of the night, see hundreds of twinkling lights in every shade imaginable. It was beautiful. It was magnificent. It was truly magical.

My heart swelled three times that day.

Whenever I need a little pick-me-up--like, if the fucking postal service is dicking me over with a special little gift that I had ordered for my wife to brighten her Christmas--I think about the trip across central Ohio and looking out through the black and blue and gray haze and seeing little spots of colored lights shining through the murk.

Merry Christmas, everybody.

Addendum:

This is fucking brilliant. Go read it.

It's a Christmas Miracle

Friday afternoon could have been one of the happiest of my recent life, ranking right up there with my marriage to the Comely and Buxom Boudicca, the births of my children, and the firing of Bob Davie George O'Leary Tyrone Willingham Charlie Weis. You see, it snowed.

More importantly, I got the afternoon off. Working in the South is great!

More important than that was that my director took us out for lunch right before being let off early for work. And nothing goes with Christmas and the firing of a subpar football coaches snow like Cajun food. Yep, Cajun food, snow, and farts that make your asshole feel like it's on fire. One heaping helping of Christmas Spirit for me!

I got home Friday afternoon. By the time I got home, there was a whole zero inches of snow on the ground and there was no precipitation falling at all. Feeling guilty about getting out of work early, I decided to head out and mail off my packages for Christmas. Otherwise, my parents might not have their cheap bottles of wine books and my nieces would be missing out on their Bible Charades game. Talk about shattering Christmas dreams!

So, I braved the Winter Storm that Wasn't with packages to mail, visions of snow bunnies and stranded traveling college coeds dancing in my head. I also had to get a few last second items for my kids and some Coke Zero for my wife, lest she drink all of my drinks and then we'd be fist fighting...again...and that's just not good for the Holiday Spirit. Plus, it wouldn't be a fair fight at all, what with me wielding that chemical warfare out of my rectum and whatnot.

As I was wrapping up my holiday shopping and package shipping and picking up dinner, the snow finally started coming down. I walked into Wendys to get some bacon-encrusted burgers for me and the fam healthy salads and the snow was coming down, the streets were wet but not slick, but the grassy areas were snowed over. I came out of Wendys a little bit later and the parking lot and my car were both covered in snow. Awesome.

I realize that my measly one inch of snow doesn't stack up with what a lot of you got this past weekend. So, spare me your sob stories of how you got a foot of snow. I thought everyone wanted 12 inches +. I had enough snow on the ground to be able to take my kids outside and play in it Saturday morning. My daughter was even able to make a couple of snow men Lilliputians. The snow wasn't exactly the best for packing (what with that layer of ice over the top of it), but it was good enough for making snow men Lilliputians. And my daughter took the lid off one of the bins that holds their outside toys and used it as a snowboard...more or less.

But, perhaps the greatest Christmas Miracle of all? My children set aside their petty squabbles and their sibling rivalry in a way that can on be described as "heartwarming". And that would be your hearts, because mine was filled with bitterness and anger (and Cajun spices). You see, they set aside their sibling rivalry so that they could work together to pummel me with snowballs. They even found a way to work in a nutshot or two. Nothing says Christmas like writhing around in the snow with a pulsing, throbbing pain in your groin. Am I right, folks?

And I should have seen it coming, too. My son actually wrote out a list of things to do in the snow. It was as follows:

1. Build igloos
2. Make snow angels
3. Build snowmen
4. Throw snowballs at my dad
5. Sterilize daddy by smacking him in the Balzac with compacted spheres of ice and crushing his gonads to kibble. Finish the job with a fist if necessary.

I may have made that last one up. It didn't slow him or his sister down from accomplishing number 5, however.

In order to make my pain better, apparently, he brought me $0.47 in various coins Saturday evening while I was sitting on the couch rethinking the decision to have children enjoying a holiday special. "What's this for?" I asked him. "That's for taking me outside to play today. You earned it," he responded.

For some reason, I have a bad feeling about how his dating life...

Alas, the snow has melted away. Such is the ephemeral nature of a Southern Snowstorm. My children's hearts are broken, I'm sure. But my nutsack can rest assured that, for one more day at least, it is protected and safe from ice balls being hurled at it, thus sending my testicles flying apart only to smack together and jangle about like a pair of castanets. Arriba!

Despite all this, the snow has finally--finally--locked me into the Holiday Spirit. Mistletoe and ho ho ho and pretty girls wearing only bows and whatever the hell else Lucy says to Schroeder. And brandy-infused eggnog. Can't forget the essentials.

Still, all I want for Christmas is for the swelling to go down.