I’m taking a break from Christmas today – both on the site and in real life.

See, my “office” (a spare bedroom) is in shambles and has been for years. I’m going to tell you that story in full, but not today. Just know that it involves severe confessions that I would never share if I wasn’t sure that the post would be epic.

My office has become a room that we simply cannot walk into. During this time, I’ve commandeered various other spots in our apartment as my “work station,” which is ideal for no one.

Well, we finally decided to take care of business, and the slow, exhausting process of cleaning out my office has begun.

Given that whole situation, we’ve been extra critical about the rest of our apartment. We have a decent amount of space, but it’s far from limitless, and when the people living in it tend to collect every damn thing in the universe, push comes to shove very quickly.

Don’t get me wrong: If you’re a normal human being, our place looks ridiculous. I’ve got a seven foot Jason Voorhees in my living room, and enough moai statues to make me appear anything but Catholic. Still, given our inclinations, it’s downright sparse.

Over the last few years, I’ve really lost my zeal for hoarding bullshit. As I’ve written before, the stuff you see on X-E nowadays is almost universally purchased because of X-E, and more often than not, I just chuck the stuff as soon as the articles are posted.

But old habits die hard, and even when I’m trying to be on my best behavior, there are still glimpses of the hoarding monkey I was born to be.

Case in point: The Kryptonite Crazy Box.

In 2003, I wrote a filthy tribute to Superman’s Kryptonite Rocks, which were crosses between pet rocks and, uh, kryptonite. Sometime after that, I actually managed to find one of the originals, still in its awesome little box. (Little, yes, but still much larger than it needed to be – you could fit ten of Superman’s rocks in there, easily.)

For years, that box has sat on a DVD shelf in our living room. For exactly as long, I’ve been sneaking small things that I really should’ve thrown away into it. It’s become my crypt for crap that Ms. X surely would’ve tossed on one of her many frustrated bouts of cleaning. Fortunately for me, she never thought to check the Kryptonite box.

Over the past few months especially, as we’ve grown even more critical of what we’ll allow in our apartment, I’ve come to rely on this box in a big way. The stack of shit kept getting taller and taller, finally outgrowing the box. It got the point where I couldn’t even remember half of what I’d put in there to begin with.

Well, in the spirit of growing up and moving on and being something more closely resembling human, today, I’m going to break the seal. The bright side is, I should get a pretty good post out of this.

It’s time to find out exactly what’s been hiding inside my Kryptonite Crazy Box.

Actually, once I poured the contents out and got a good look at the stuff, I realized that I’d never be able to list everything. There was simply too much in there. (And, frankly, I’m not sure the world needs to hear about random coins, or tiny plastic action figure guns.) Instead, we’ll focus on the highlights.

I have no idea what compelled me to put these precise items in the box. There’s no rhyme or reason. Some of it is junk I’ve written about, but most of it is just…well, junk. Of the dozens of things in there, there are only 3 or 4 that were truly were saving.

To fully appreciate the contents, you have to understand just how much nonsense I’ve accumulated through the years. It is absolutely legendary.

I’ll put it this way: Losing my job is no huge concern, because in a pinch, I could eBay my ass off for a solid five years.

With this world of bull surrounding my every moment at home, it's amazing that this was the crud I deemed “box worthy.”

Here we go! [more]

You have my personal guarantee. By the end of this post, you will be hungry enough to eat a Peruvian giant yellow leg centipede.

Fools. I’d like to see you try.

Here’s the situation.

Kraft has unleashed enough holiday marshmallows to make it clear that they’re seeking penance for mortal sins. It’s even better than the stunt they pulled during Halloween. No matter how hard Dracula tries, he’ll never be as comfortable in a pile of spongy candy as Santa Claus. This is why Vlad rhymes with sad.

I dare say that it didn’t really feel like Christmastime until tonight, when I set an hour aside for a psychopathic holiday mallow photo shoot. As Bruce warned me to watch out and avoid crying, there I was, practically enveloped by four metric tons of fun-shaped marshmallows. It was glorious. Had I been drinking sherry from a fancy glass, someone seriously should’ve painted me.

I found three distinctly Christmassy types of marshmallows, and best of all, Kraft listed goofy recipes for each on the backs of the bags. Hey, if they could go through the trouble of thinking those recipes up, the least I could do was melt a little butter and get my hands dirty. Dirtier.

So, yes, in addition to showing you the marshmallows, I’ll also demonstrate what you can make with them. I don’t mind telling you that I’ve never devoted so much of my day to marshmallows before. I feel like I have a career in marshmallows. It feels fat. [more]

One of the sad byproducts of having such an elephantine blog archive is that nobody bothers looking at it.

I don’t blame you. The X-E blog went live in 2002, and save for design changes and a migration to WordPress, it really hasn’t changed much since Day 1. That means no convenient tags, and only a brief flirtation with categories. Even if you know exactly what you’re looking for, it takes work to get there. Maybe I should do something about that?

In the interim, I’d like to draw attention to some of my favorite holiday-themed posts from years past.

First, some notes:

1. Even back during the blog’s 2002 debut, I was fucking up the Advent Calendar and hearing shit about it.

2. It’s so strange to look back at the comments on the oldest posts. Some of them are over nine years old. God knows if any of those people still read the site. Probably not more than a handful. Let’s say someone who commented back then was 18. Now he’d or she’d be 27! I can’t help imagining how their lives could have changed over that time. Some of them may be dead!

3. In 2002, I had a pretty ugly Christmas tree.

Below: A list of exactly 21 old holiday blogs. Most of them are from last year, because when we go back further than that, my misuse of quotation marks is even more legendary than it is today. [more]

We’re three weeks away from Christmas Eve. That’s too little. I want five weeks. At least, I did until I remembered that it’d place me squarely at the point where I was going crazy trying to find the ingredients for Thanksgiving’s stuffed mushrooms. That wasn’t fun. Nobody had pine nuts.

Fearing that the speedy calendar will screw me out of covering everything I'd wanted to before Santa comes, today, I’m going to spew red and green until it kills me. Assorted holiday thingamajigs, ahoy!

Philips USB Powered Miniature Christmas Tree: God, yes! Something reasonably “adult!” I’ve become so accustomed to writing about things intended for the pre-tween set that this stupid tree feels like an issue of Playboy. The comparison only works if their December centerfold has silver hair and light-up nipples. Does she?

It’s a six-inch Christmas tree powered by a USB cable, ensuring that your "web time" will be festive even when you’re not looking up recipes for mince pies. It’s seven bucks and worth every penny, and it’s the only thing that has ever made me yearn to work in an office again. I’d gain instant credibility with my co-workers with this on my desk. Nobody with a USB tree could be a tyrant or vulture.

The tree was easily the highlight of my week, which is both a testament to Philips and an insult to me. I could not love it more. Target had ‘em in various colors, but if I’m going to have a computer-powered tree from Christmas Future, I don’t see why I’d pick green over space age silver.

I want more of them. A dozen of them. My printer, scanner and camera cables can wait until January. I want an entire Christmas village surrounding my monitor, casting a disco glow on my pasty skin. I write this because one of Santa’s elves could be taking notes. It’s a hint, Elfie. I don’t need any more zip-up hoodies from American Eagle Outfitters. I hate their logo and would never be their billboard. [more]