Don’t get me wrong: I like Christmas. However, its continual encroachment into other holidays (namely, Thanksgiving and Halloween and, pretty soon, Labor Day) has forced me to take a stand. I’m going to spend the entire week celebrating Thanksgiving (by surreptitiously drinking at work), just to differentiate the damn thing from Christmas.

Here are the things I’m thankful for this year:

• The Family
• The Friends
• The Readers (most of whom are family and friends)
• The continued existence of Chicken Helper boxed meals (fried rice flavor, though it tastes nothing like fried rice)
• And the Chubb group of insurance companies.

Given the incredible opportunity for causing offense that the holiday season provides, what with all of the varied individual food-preferences that everyone seems to have, I will say only this: Eat and grow large, my friends.
That said, I’m taking another week off from the blog.