Heck Of A Guy

Christmas Past Tense

I was about my usual seasonal business, making a list, checking it twice, … that kind of thing, when I realized that certain elements of my declarations, gifts, and behaviors from previous Christmases could come back to haunt me, not unlike the apparition Mr. Dickens created for A Christmas Carol,¹ unless I proactively dealt with potential problems.

Thus, DrHGuy presents …

Heck of a Guy 2007 Christmas Season Update #1:
Regulatory Revisions In The 2007 DrHGuy Pre-Christmas No-Buy Zone Code

By now, everyone should have received the reminder that, as of December 1, the No-Buy Zone is in effect.² Consequently, purchases, either for your own benefit or for the benefit of another individual or group of individuals who might be on the DrHGuy Christmas gift recipient list, of goods and services which could potentially duplicate, obviate, or otherwise lessen the value of gifts I may or may not bestow upon you or others in celebration of Christmas or Christmas-equivalent winter holidays, including but not limited to Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, Ramadan, Diwali, and Wiccan Yule,³ are prohibited until the holiday season officially terminates.

I refer you to the the 2006 Pre-Christmas No-Buy Zone post for the terms, specific restrictions and exceptions, all of which are currently in effect with two exceptions. Those two changes in the 2007 DrHGuy Pre-Christmas No-Buy Zone follow:

1. Certain vital healthcare items have been added to the exclusionary clause of the No-Buy Zone.

As of December 1, 2007, individuals are, the imposition of the No-Buy Zone notwithstanding, free to purchase unlimited quantities of the the AlignMap Patient Compliance Commemorative Plaques from the Heck of a Guy Mercantile & Schwag Emporium.

2. The section dealing with children and grandchildren has been extensively liberalized, as outlined below:

Whereas, it would be a hardship for parents and grandparents to completely forgo the accumulation of gifts for their own youngsters even though I may someday choose to buy presents for those same tykes myself, I have therefore, in a demonstration of Christmas graciousness and generosity that should be an example for people everywhere and may well serve as my Christmas gift to the world, stipulated that parents and grandparents may purchase for their children or grandchildren under the age of eight any two gifts from the following list:

• [2006 version] An orange
• [2007 revision] Any one serving from any one of the following fruit categories: apples (except Honeycrisp⁴ ), oranges,⁵ bananas, kiwis, persimmons, any of the melons (including Casaba, Crenshaw, Musk Net Melon, Crimson, Icebox, Sugar Baby, Yellow, Ecstasy, Sangria, Sharlyn, Sweet Charantais Melon AKA French Charantais Melon, Galia, Honeydew, Wax, Winter, Ogen Melon, Pepino, Derishi Russian Seedless Water Melon, and yes, even Christmas Melon⁶ ), or a child’s handful of strawberries, blueberries, or grapes other than seedless grapes.⁷
  
  The following portions of this section are unchanged:

• A bag of hard candy permanently welded into a single lump
• Any toy retailing for under $0.46
• A bright, shiny, new quarter
• A donation of no more than $1 to a missionary fund made in the child’s name

As always, those who have exercised sufficient forethought to purchase extra provisions for the duration of the No-Buy Zone should be fine. For those less prepared … well, culling the herd, while a tad incongruent with the usual festive spirit of the season, is in its own way a gift to others.

A Christmas Bonus: The Yule Epistles

Should one need a model on which to base a great holiday newsletter (i.e., one that folks will read because they enjoy reading it), or if one is searching for something seasonal but not sappy or sentimental, look no farther. These Yuletide letters were written 9-19 years ago and published in the 2006 Heck of a Guy Christmas posts, but I think you’ll find them, especially those written by Julie, entertaining, lively, and fresh.

• Julie’s 1993 Christmas Letter
• Julie’s 1994 Christmas Letter
• Julie’s 1997 Christmas Letter
• 1998 Showalter Family Christmas Letter
• DrHGuy’s Christmas Letter 1988

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1. Of course, for those children too young to successfully resist their parents’ wishes, the most terrifying aspect of A Christmas Carol is the annual enactment of the Coerced Attendance of the Innocents For Their Own Good, which features reluctant offspring being dragged to one theater or another to see still another puzzling yet stupefyingly boring production of the theater version of Dickens’s classic tale when those youngsters would prefer, if theater is somehow necessary this time of year, How The Grinch Stole Christmas (or Sweeney Todd, for that matter). As always, it could be worse – nothing signifies “Christmas” to a ten year old old boy quite like the being in the audience for the local dance school’s performance of the “Nutcracker” ballet, a presentation that includes his eight year old sister apparently playing the role of a randomly perambulating bush. [↩]
2. Said reminder is only a courtesy and claims that no such notice was received, whether such claims are accurate or scurrilous lies created in hopes of escaping the meting out of punishments, is not accounted a valid excuse and will certainly not trigger offers of pardon or mercy. [↩]
3. Note that avoiding a specific holiday name by the use of terms such as “holiday,” “Jesus’ birthday,” “that special time of year,” “seasonal festivities,” etc does not relieve one of the obligations of the No-Buy Zone. [↩]
4. Honeycrisp apples are both too wondrously tasty and too costly for children, who, in any case, need something reserved for adulthood, lest they succumb to anomie consequent to reaching the age of 12 only to realize that the future is a psychologically barren abyss devoid of unfulfilled wishes. [↩]
5. I do feel obligated to remind readers that, despite the obvious temptation to which this listing lends itself, comparing apples and oranges is almost always a mistake [↩]
6. It is, of course, counterintuitive of me to allow Christmas Melons AKA Santa Claus Melons on what it, after all, a Christmas list. It is true that typically a whiff or even a whiff-ette of irony, such as that garnered from banning Christmas Melons from a Christmas list, would be sufficient causation for me to take exactly that action. Perhaps I’m mellowing or perhaps I’m surrendering the opportunity to make manifest this potential instance of whimsical malevolence in exchange for some sort of karmic gratification. Or, perhaps my inner child is just delighted with the thought of some brat somewhere unwrapping a package festooned with satin ribbons and wrapped in brightly colored paper to discover what the good folks at the Texas Cooperative Extension of Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas describe as a melon with a “football shape, weighing upwards of 5 to 8 pounds …. [covered by] yellow to green mottled rinds” and endowed with a taste that is most diplomatically signaled by the omission of this quality from reports such as that found at The Cook’s Thesaurus, which notes that the Christmas Melon is “distinguished mostly by its long shelf life–you can store an uncut Santa Claus melon for several months,” before going on to offer “Substitutes: honeydew (better flavor) OR cantaloupe (better flavor).”
   
   
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7. One has to draw the line somewhere [↩]