Fellow Mistletoe Enthusiasts:
The first Christmas decorations appeared in Colorado shortly after Labor Day this year, an event that left us feeling unprepared for the holidays. We compensated by attending our first Christmas party of the season on Halloween, during which, in the midst of an indecorous candy-eating spree, Tom ingested a small doily he had mistaken for an ornate chunk of divinity.
A doily, though lacy and delicate in appearance, will lodge solidly in the human windpipe when swallowed. Fortunately, after ten years of marriage to an indiscriminate eating machine who often forgets to chew, JoAnn has grown quite adept at administering the Heimlich maneuver. Her efforts resulted in an unholiday-like display that will preclude our attendance at next year’s Halloween Christmas party. In addition to this social snub, our home and landscaping have suffered several drive-by flockings this fall, leading us to believe Tom should not eat in public.
Other useful tasks performed by JoAnn during 2003 include assisting her Mother, Rita, with the management of Photo ImageCenter, ensuring the hygiene of Colorado’s dairy cows and goats through her lab work at the CSU Vet School, helping with the care of her Grandmother Harriet, and maintaining the health and beauty of four semi-tame pets: Avery the dieting dog, the ever-elusive Cecil, Emma the mouse huntress, and new arrival Olive, who has taken a liking to the feline extreme sports of electrical-cord chewing, stinging-insect pursuit, and small-dog taunting. JoAnn also continues her quest to provide room and board for every bird, squirrel, fox, raccoon, and coyote within the city limits.
Hoping to begin 2004 with a less apathetic persona, Tom spent most of the year trying to get somebody, anybody, to steal his apparently undesirable identity. These efforts have thus far proven fruitless. Fortunately, he doesn’t care. He did, however, manage to overcome the effects of crippling lethargy long enough to learn one valuable lesson regarding highway travel: speed limits seem much easier to obey when your vehicle somehow, through no fault of your own, ends up sliding backwards into oncoming traffic on one of Colorado’s deadliest stretches of interstate.
The end of another year always brings to mind one of our favorite mottoes: Time marches on, but memory doesn’t. So do something embarrassing December 31. Light the flames of the New Year with this year’s trash and start living the life you’ve always hallucinated. We wish you and yours the ability to keep you and your sport utility vehicle upright in 2004.
