The holidays

 That's one down and two to go.  In its wake, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which are the waves of Christmas battering down on the bones of the turkey and the broken dishes of the yams and cranberries, and all that crap the eating of which is more a chore than, I don't know, our expression of thankfulness.

I never liked that food especially, and when my sister's plan to have that kind of Thanksgiving in her apartment fell through because one of the nephews decided to go to his girl friend's family for the holiday, that was fine with me.  Harry Caray's offered some kind of Thanksgiving dinner which I declined in favor of spaghetti and meatballs and I never regretted my choice, the meatballs were big and the sauce was thick and tasty.

So now the joy of Christmas lights and the painful din of Christmas songs, and there is some kind of general gemutlichkeit among the citizens which is pleasant.  And you know sometimes it seems to just go on and on, and then suddenly it is right there in front of you.

The last couple of years we have gone without giving any presents at all, and it has been great, but now for some unknowable reason my sister wants to bring it back.  The horror, the horror.

In the height of my beer-drinking days I embraced New Years Eve wholeheartedly.  Perhaps the less said about that the better, but anymore I just mope around and nurse a few beers until The Fireworks.  It seems like they get bigger each year.  They shoot them off not only at Navy Pier but from all of the bridges, so that they are exploding at eye level maybe fifty feet from me, and they go on and on and on.

And then I am ready to face all of long January, all of short February (the longest little month of the year), and maybe halfway through March there are reports of the slender girl in the pea green gown hanging out with the crocuses.  Can tomatoes be far behind?

And speaking of tomatoes, I am sure Old Dog has heard of this:  https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/spacex-launches-tomato-seeds-supplies-to-international-space-station-3558150

Tom Tom Tomato may be bursting with pride on the north side, thinking about how, just by being delicious, his ilk has been able to use humankind to launch into space, and after this the whole universe likely.  That experiment of achieving world domination by not being destroyed in the human digestive system has come a crapper, but this new plan is so crazy that it just might work.