The Advent Calendar is now up to date — yes, it would be nice to have it ready at the start of each day rather than the end of each day, but this is what happens when Advent Calendar entries grow to a hundred times their original size.  I will now celebrate the completion of this giant sized entry with a bag of Christmas-flavored Sun Chips.

I couldn't believe my eyes when I spotted these, but my eyes never lying.  Sun Chips is celebrating the holidays with limited edition packages of "Cinnamon Crunch" flavored snacks, which come in cinnamony foil bags with big cinnamony bow graphics on 'em.

Only Sun Chips could successfully pull this off, because…well, could you do cinnamon potato chips?  Cinnamon cheese puffs?  Nope.  Sun Chips can get away with it because nobody really knows what a Sun Chip is to begin with.  A company can throw around the term "multigrain" all they want — all we take from that is "moderately healthy," and it requires a good five minutes of thought to even come up with a reasonable theory on what "multigrain" actually tastes like.  Within that, if Sun Chips wants to throw cinnamon all over itself, we've got no basis to complain.  We can't say that cinnamon "doesn't go" with Sun Chips BECAUSE WE DON'T KNOW WHAT SUN CHIPS ARE!

I say this mostly because my heart tells me that it is both wrong and criminal to make cinnamon-flavored chips, and yet, I grab a handful of these and totally spite myself by being pleased.  I'm confident that these are about as good as cinnamon-flavored chips could possibly be.

Looking to compare its flavor to some other flavor, the best I can come up with is this: Picture eating a bunch of Cinnamon Toast Crunch mashed together with fifteen tablespoons of salt.  Actually, that sounds kinda gross.  These really aren't gross.  Weird?  Yes.  Gross?  No.  Once you get past your culturally influenced reservations about cinnamon-flavored chips, they're rather pleasant, definitely festive, and arrive in bags so reflective that you can nearly watch yourself eating in them.

To celebrate having an apartment that could once again seat more than two people, we had some friends over on Saturday night.  Evidently forgetting that our bones are ten years older than they used to be, we threw caution to the wind and plowed through what must've been a fourteen gallon bottle of Jager.  After six hours of poker, bullshitting, Christmas music and various side trips, the last thing I remember is everyone watching Pee-wee's Christmas Special and me slurring to my friend to "stay awake for the Little Richard part…oh man the Little Richard part."  I, however, did not stay awake, and spent most of Sunday reminding myself that, as a fifty-year-old, I can no longer drink wheelbarrows full of alcohol.

Somewhere along the way, one of us got the brilliant idea to drive to a local church's live manger, even though it was past 2 AM by that point.  I've written about this manger before, but I have to admit — however sacrilegious, it's a lot more fun to sneak into church mangers with live animals when you're crocked in the middle of then night than to do it in the afternoon with a bunch of kids shoving you aside so they can have the better "llama petting position."

During "open hours," the manger consists of what I'd guess you'd call an open garage connected to a small, hay-covered field.  In the middle of the night, though, it's just a garage.  We didn't have to break in or anything — the door on the side of the garage/barn was wide open, so I don't feel like I need to Hail Mary my ass out of purgatory.  Or at least, I didn't until I started interrogating the various ostriches and goats.  "Where were YOU on the night of the 11th, OSTRICH?!  We know what you did, GOAT!"  Things like that — drunken stupid things.

Since this was a real church's manger/nativity, the religious statues weren't of the plastic, goofy-faced variety.  These were the hardcore statues.  The big ones.  The haunting ones.  The kind you cock your head at and try not to blink, because you're sure they'll wink at you or something if you just look at them long enough.

There were all sorts of animals in there, and only now do I realize that we probably shouldn't have been feeding them just because they was an open bag of manger animal food laying in the barn.  Oh well, at least we threw some dolla dolla bills y'all into the donation box.  I'll never know for sure if these animals come on loan from the zoo each year or if they retire to an underground utopian animal society from January-November, but for what it's worth, they were fucking friendly animals.  How many times can you say "c'mere goat" and actually have it be paid off?

Fun times.  We didn't stay for too long because we kind of knew we weren't supposed to be there, and there's only so long you can tempt fate before a lightning bolt hits you in the head.

On Sunday, I woke up very very late, and realized that if I had any interest in getting a Christmas tree this year, it was probably time to do so.  I'll tell you about that later, but the story involves another manger.  It wasn't a church's manger this time, so the nativity's Jesus was less granitey goodness and more plastic with a light-up face.

The Advent Calendar has been updated for December 16th, and I'm going to have to make this quick, because people are coming over to drink my liquor and steal things from my dresser drawers when I'm not looking.  I hope you find tonight's Saturday Night Thread pleasing, because it's the last one before Christmas so it better be pleasing.

Found this great stocking stuffer yesterday.  I'm not using it to stuff any stockings, but those who are in for treats!  It's a "Mini Robopet," based on the much larger, much more intuitive and much more expensive giant Robopets (reptiles and robots, more correctly) littering the store aisles and always going on sale because, for whatever reason, nobody wants to buy the damn things.  When miniaturized, they're just neat, "regular" action figures, save for a wind-up mechanism that lets the creatures noisily struggle to span four inches over a hard surface.

It's a nice "round out" gift to get a kid because, okay, let's say you got him a Wii for Christmas.  The Wii's a pretty big gift, and it's probably the only really "big" gift you're gonna get the kid for one measly holiday.  Throw in a $5 Mini Robopet, and he can go back to school bragging to everyone that he "got a Wii and a Robopet!"  He needn't classify his Robopet as a toy miniature, and everyone will consider him a rich ass hero!

Yes, they do sell Mini Robopets even when it's not Christmas, but here's how they tied it in: When you browse the stocking stuffer aisle and see the shelf full of Mini Robopets, note how they only put the red and green ones out.  I dig that.  It's subtle and smart.  Like a 1974 California blush.

The Advent Calendar has been updated for December 15th, and holy shit, I cannot believe it's already December 15th.  2006 has been the quickest year in history.  Tonight, we're supposed to go find the tree.  In recent years, I've become pretty fond of "miniature trees," and I don't mean tabletop bullshit trees or anything like that, but rather SPECIALLY BRED trees that are about 4' high, but really full and boisterous.

They tend to cost more than the regularly sized giant trees for reasons I cannot comprehend, but since there's less green to work with overall, we can totally saturate the bitch and create THE most decorated tree on all of God's green Earth.  Plus, at only 4', we're free to put the entire tree on some kind of platform, which decreases the chances of cat-related tree injuries that will make me angry and manifest into tree-related cat injuries.  I'll let you know how it goes.  Now, let's talk about whipped cream.

In the spirit of the holiday season, Land O' Lakes has taken whipped cream (or for most of us dolt, "whip cream") to the extreme and unveiled new peppermint whipped cream — a sweetened, ultra pasteurized bastion of Yuletide cheer that arrives in a special, reflective can trimmed with snowflake graphics and other icons that'll help you associate peppermint whipped cream with Christmas.  Notwithstanding the missed opportunity of failing to give their Native American Butterwoman mascot a Santa cap, this is still a pretty decent little idea.

It's also a chance for me to tell the world how much I hate taking photos of tall, cylindrical items.  To fit the whole product, I either have to make the image really small, or really large, or if I really want it to be somewhere in the middle, I've gotta pad the left and right quadrants with empty space.  It's the kind of thing that can suck the holiday spirit right out of a person, so let's see if the stuff tastes good enough to put that spirit right back inside me.

Yeah, I was kinda wishing for some white/red swirly action, but despite its plain coloredness, this is some mighty fine peppermint whipped cream.  Actually, it takes just like mint chip ice cream to me, which is a totally welcome comparison since that's my favorite ice cream flavor.  Whipped cream is so not a part of my everyday life that I'm hard-pressed to think up a really great use for a special peppermint version, but if you're gonna boink on Christmas morning and your target is game for kinkiness, this would certainly be appropriate.

PS, this is the last day for free shipping on Amazon, so if you were considering buying me a $3000 Pac-Man game, now's the time soul sister.

Our apartment is just absolutely covered in empty Amazon boxes, a sure sign that we're almost done Christmas shopping.  Gifts for each other, and for the 200,000 children in each of our families.  It's a pretty sweet deal on my side, actually.  If a couple has kids, then everyone else only has to buy for their kids.  If they don't, and we most certainly do not, then everyone has to buy for the couple, and more importantly, me.  Sure, my family's success rate with getting me Christmas presents that are worth bragging about has dwindled through the years, but it's still nice to know that, come 11:55 PM on Christmas Eve, I can line a bunch of wrapped boxes with my name on them up on the couch and pretend that it's still okay for me to do that.

Then again, it's the giving.  I take great pride in the gifts we give everyone's kids, at least in part because, hey, those kids expect me to give them good gifts.  They've seen my toys and video games.  If I give them shit in a vase, they'll know that I knew better.  I also like to go straight to the source, because when I ask my siblings what to get their kids, I know I'm getting homogenized versions of their real wishlists. Like, one of my nephews is really into pro-wrestling, but his parents want to limit his pro-wrestling intake because he keeps piledriving his dog, so they try to convince me that what he really wants is stuff like Ice Age DVDs.  Screw that.  I just ask the kids themselves what they want, and after they ponder the question for a good three hours and offer more answers than the napkin I'm scribbling on can fit, I have a pretty good idea of what will make them believe Mommy was kissing Santa Claus.

Because I think it's something I'll want to remember later, here are the five best gifts I'm giving to the kiddies this year.  No, not the five most expensive.  The five I like the best. [more]

I've always wanted to review A Garfield Christmas Special, but for one reason or another, it's never happened.  I guess it's because it's a special I love so much that I wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than a mega long feature that took days to forge, but at the same time, it's a really simplistic cartoon that doesn't call for much yap.  I'd end up going too long, and then I'd have to get all mean to cover myself, and the last thing I want to do is blast Odie's back-scratcher, or worse, Grandma Hotlips Arbuckle, just because I've run out of things to say.

I still want to pay tribute to the special somehow, because it meant just as much to my personal holiday season growing up as did…well, pretty much anything else.  This shit was right up there with Charlie Brown.  We tend to romanticize how much we used to love certain things, and when I really think about it, as much as I enjoyed watching all of the Rankin/Bass stuff during the holidays, there probably were a few years that I knowingly skipped them.  Not so with Charlie Brown, and no, not so with Garfield.  This was one of the ones I had to watch.

With that, I respectfully borrow a title from something that I'm sure VH1 has already trademarked for future use, and proudly present, The Top TWO Most Awesomely Obscure Things About A Garfield Christmas Special.  That's right.  The Top TWO.  As something of an expert on A Garfield Christmas Special (and by that I just mean that I've seen it fourteen trillion times), I've picked up on a couple of Holy Shit Moments™ that maybe some of the more "casual" viewers missed. [more]

In the most shocking turn of events ever, I went and posted a real, regular article.  Caveat is, it's a really short, malformed article.  Actually, it was going to just be a blog entry, but I couldn't convince myself to sentence something as awesome as Oatmeal Swirlers to the depths of the blog archive, so, here we are.  Oatmeal Swirlers delighted my childhood hands and tongue by letting me draw edible pictures all over oatmeal, and even if you weren't around for those joys, I hope this article will help you understand why they were joys. Includes poorly made spiral graphics and a download of the original commercial.