As some of you may have already gathered by reading some of my blogs…I’m not exactly the poster child for Christmas cheer. I don’t wear “ugly Christmas sweaters,” don’t EVER wear red and green together in one outfit, have only a very tiny Christmas tree, stopped sending Christmas cards 20 years ago or so, don’t play holiday music (except Fairytale New York by The Pogues), bah humbug, yada yada. Hey…I do like holiday ales! Mmm…spicy high ABV beers will DEFINITELY get my holiday spirits a flowin! I also like checking out how people deck out their houses for the holidays and I LOVE string lights. See? I don’t hate EVERYTHING about Christmas! So if you had plans to send three ghosts to visit me tonight to teach me to be more “spirited” about the holidays, well, then think AGAIN, Mister! You got the WRONG house!

Santa and me, circa 1977. When I saw that the two local malls in my ‘hood both had different Santas, I was dubious of the whole “Santa” thing (yes even at that young age). My fifth year of life was actually kind of a traumatic one, but that’s a blog topic for later!

My workplace is having “Holiday Spirit Week” next week. I am looking forward to it with about as much gusto as I viewed pep rallies when I was in high school. I always had an “I gave at the office” attitude about “school spirit” because I was in the band, which meant I played the fight song at home football games and at pep rallies. And thus exhausted any semblance of “school spirit.” Our fight song was actually On Wisconsin. So it wasn’t even WRITTEN for our school! Lame…

Next week, I will be showing my holiday spirit at work! I got a T-shirt in the mail today which I will wear on Monday, which is “Holiday Character Day.” Behold…

Is that a reindeer? Why does it have claws? No…It’s a Wendigo (sometimes spelled Windigo). In Algonquian folklore, the wendigo or windigo is a mythical man-eating monster or evil spirit native to the northern forests of the Atlantic Coast and Great Lakes Region of the United States and Canada.

I’d like to think Wednesday Addams would approve of my “holiday T-shirt!”