Now that the long awaited 4-day week­end has come and gone, at the blink of an eye I might add, it’s time to patiently await the arrival of Christ­mas and more impor­tantly pre­pare for the onslaught of hol­i­day shop­pers, cranky dri­vers and bell ringers. Every year around this time I ready myself for the crazi­ness of the hol­i­days and yet it never really mat­ters because I become caught up in the hol­i­day fever as well.

This year how­ever, my wife and I have already decided that the major­ity of our shop­ping will take place online. We fig­ure by tak­ing this strat­egy we’ll avoid most of the hol­i­day craze when peo­ple are caught in a zombie-like trance to pil­lage and plun­der local Tar­gets, K-Marts and KB Toys for the lat­est and great­est toy gad­get for their chil­dren. Luck­ily, for the time being, my daugh­ter is still young enough where she isn’t entranced by toys but con­sid­er­ing her first birth­day is next month it won’t be long until she’s tug­ging at our pant legs and star­ing up at us with those sting­ing puppy dog eyes.

I’m reminded of John Grisham’s Skip­ping Christ­mas (renamed Christ­mas with the Kranks for the Hol­ly­wood adap­ta­tion), a satir­i­cal view of the hol­i­days. The main char­ac­ters, Luther and Nora Krank, decide that they’ll skip Christ­mas after send­ing their daugh­ter off to Peru for Peace Corps. Luther tal­lies up the pre­vi­ous years expenses for Christ­mas and esti­mates they can save in the thou­sands if they take a 10-day cruise instead of cel­e­brat­ing the afore­men­tioned hol­i­day. Of course chaos erupts and the rest of the book is per­fect mate­r­ial for the typ­i­cal Hol­ly­wood Christ­mas com­edy, includ­ing a mad­cap sequence with a plas­tic snow­man and the embarass­ment of set­tling with a scrappy look­ing tree.

It just goes to show that no mat­ter how hard you try to ignore, strate­gize or avoid Christ­mas it’s never going to dis­ap­pear. You sim­ply can­not wipe Christ­mas from your cal­en­dar. It’s the prover­bial mon­key on your back, but in this case he’s wear­ing a santa cap with a 30 pound sack of presents slung over his shoulder.