Why are your eyes red? You are sweating, breathing heavily? Cover your mouth when you cough. Okay so its clear to me you have caught the bug that is going around. Normally you don’t see it until later in the year but every year it seems to get here earlier. You are done with your Christmas shopping already, aren’t you? And you bought the fuzzy Christmas tree sweater to wear at work? Have you lost your mind? You can’t be seen in public with that thing. You will get beaten up! I will do it myself if I have too. Okay but back to the issue at hand. What about Thanksgiving? How are you supposed to enjoy a day of overeating and laziness if all you can think about is putting up the tree and the Thanksgivings day sales?

There was a time in the not so distant past where the mere idea of pulling a man away from the sofa on Thanksgiving was ridiculous. Early in the morning the men of the household would gather in their pajama pants and various professional football team jerseys and fashion themselves in such a way that meager levers alone would be unable to dislodge them. Pillows and blankets would act as means to promote periodic napping and TV trays of various kinds of foods would be crammed into spots where proper television viewing would permit. Farting was not uncommon as well as burping and the periodic pillow muffled cry in support of a team but general conversation was heavily frowned upon and left for the women fold who would spend the day sitting in a circle and talking about “the soaps”.

Times have, however, changed and I fear they are for the worst. People get up early and spend time discussing the proper attack plan to visit every shop in the 5 state area that has the word sale on their brochure. The men spend the morning changing all of the preset dials on the car radio to football games and fueling up the mini-van. Next they program the navigation system to include all of the shops they are going to be dragged to that day and try to “accidentally omit” as many sweater shops as possible, replacing them with the likes of Circuit City and Best Buy. At the end of the day the family gathers in the living room to argue over Christmas decorations while bickering about how, if they had gotten up 2 hours earlier, they could have visited all the shops they wanted to. Meanwhile the men think with longing to the time where drinking mass amounts of eggnog is considered having Holiday cheer and not just an addiction.

Well you thought you would be cleaver and get all the shopping done and decorating done and spend a nice Thanksgiving reading books by the fire with your family. Hah! I can’t believe you fell for that. You are still going to have to go thru the same old Thanksgiving routine as the rest of us. Only difference is we can go off by ourselves claiming to look for Christmas presents while you are stuck with the group. If you can manage to get away I will be the one sleeping in the window display at JC Penny. Happy Holidays to all of your miserable fools.