To those who graciously fed my greed by buying me stuff from Amazon, please keep an eye out for thank you cards in the mail. (This assumes that what you sent me came with a return address, and most did.) They probably won't arrive until after Christmas, or maybe not at all if the post office questions my very terrorist-like handwriting. I'll hold off on saying more until we get to the Christmas Fallout post.

Today marks an incredible mission for me: I need to get a few Advent Calendar entries in the can, yip yip, lest I get to the point where I'm only "up to date" on Christmas Eve and have to pull a "I'm not writing the finale until after Christmas, so there" kind of deal. This should be fun. Each Advent entry is the product of between 125-200 shots taken (seriously), so I expect my camera to die and for someone to have to buy me that from Amazon, too.

Today also marks that special time of year when my brain explodes because it's finally processing that I'll never get to write about all the Christmas stuff I picked up in time for, you know, Christmas. It's with that fear that I'm going to borrow a relic from Thanksgiving and provide you with a CORNUCOPIA (!!!) of Christmas crap -- five different items that make me wanna hum "Silver Bells" while doodling wreaths on the bare walls in furniture catalogs. Let's start with...hmmm...let's start with mistletoe.

REAL MISTLETOE IN A BAG: One of the tree yards we hit over the weekend sold these. They're pretty neat. The clump of mistletoe with faux berries comes polybagged with a bunch of mistletoe factoids printed on the back of the package. Whereas I once only considered mistletoe as some happenstance excuse to tongue the nearest body, now I know that it's in fact an ancient symbol of whatever the fuck, and that Druids that lived during prehistoric times thought it was sacred shit planted by the gods. No, really. The pack-back blurb lost me at the second paragraph, though. That's what happens when you start your second paragraphs with, "It all started with a goddess called Frigga." Frigga please.

The plant is preserved, meaning its dead but will never look any more dead than it looks right now -- and it don't look too dead. Brittle as hell, though. The fake berries cheapen the whole deal, and I'm wondering why they couldn't just preserve berries too. Maybe berries are harder to preserve? Can anyone tell me? Are berries unpreservable?

CHRISTMAS STORY LEG LAMP: A friend bought me this for Christmas, evidently because he wanted to stay my friend through good times and through bad. I've very foolishly never bothered to pick one of these up before; they've been produced and sold through the toy wizards at NECA for a few years now. My friend wasn't a good enough friend to spend the $200+ on a full-sized leg lamp (I don't have any friends that good enough), but this tabletop variety is just aces. It's my minor award.

Everything is just as it should be. Aside from the normal lightbulb that screws into the normal lightbulb spot, there's a smaller bulb hidden in the electric sex that provides the leg with its own illumination. The shade is top notch, with all the right colors and frills, and the thing even has that same weird slant as the one seen in A Christmas Story. I always end up with a few Christmas decorations that become year-round decorations -- this is one of them. It will shine the pages of my late night books well into August. Then the bulbs will blow out and I'll never remember to buy them again because who the hell remembers to pick up 40 watt lightbulbs?

EMPEROR PALPATINE TREE ORNAMENT: The continuing saga of wacky Star Wars holiday decorations...uh, continues. This Palpatine tree ornament may just be a repackaged Darth Sidious ornament, but no matter, they're the (SPOILERS!) same guy. Either way, Palpatine as a Christmas tree ornament is both very right and very wrong, and this one came my way in a big window box for around four bucks. It's the ugliest piece of shit ornament I've ever seen, but it still looks like Palpatine enough for me to want to run to my ornamentless tree and turn it into a one-ornament tree. Campy as it may have been, I would've liked to see some holiday theming here. Maybe a Santa hat would've been too much, but with the way Palpie is posed, perhaps some snow mittens with burns around the figures from all the Force lightning?

JONES SODA SUGAR PLUM SODA: I've been seriously behind on covering Jones Soda's holiday exploits, mainly because I grew tired of writing "this tastes kinda good" and "this tastes like yer uncle's ass juice in a bottle haaaa." I'm still forever impressed by what the company does. After another rockin' Holiday Pack (this time, the pièce de résistance was antacid flavored soda), Jones unleashed a couple of Christmas specific beverages meant to make us Catholics feel more catered to than everyone else.

Sadly, I've only found Sugar Plum Soda so far. It's lilac hue reminds me of one of my many unfortunate high school dye jobs, and as for the taste, let's say...GRAPE. Not "hideous grape" -- not the kind of grape I usually rally against, but rather a grape closer to a grape Fla-Vor-Ice, which as everyone knows tastes nothing like grape. No, I think I'd put this one under the general umbrella of "purple stuff." It's what the fridge-raiding kid passed on in that old Sunny D commercial. We finally know!

X-MAS TREE BUTTER SCULPTURE: Yeah, I had to buy this. Not much to say -- it's a slab of butter shaped like a Christmas tree. And I mean, really shaped like a Christmas tree -- ornaments and all. I always buy shit like this with grand visions of having novelty-driven dinner parties, but then I remember that I have like six friends and all they want to do is drink. I think I need to take up a secret life as a transsexual housewife who plans brouhahas for her husband's workerbees. Maybe then I'll have just cause for butter shaped like a Christmas tree being in my refrigerator.

Posted by Matt on 12/21/2006. E-mail me!