Mamacita says:  We have entered that time of the year that is my very favorite:  the season of anticipation of the season.

Planning and preparing for the holidays is what I look forward to all the rest of the year!  I did most of my Christmas shopping in April!  My Christmas music is already in the cd player!  I’m pathetic.  This time of year makes me happy.  Just looking at the calendar makes me happy.  I am not made glad by just ANY calendar page, mind you; only the ones approaching the year’s crown: December.  I love eveerything about Christmas, from the family reunions to the making of lists to the checking them twice to the cooking and baking to the actual Reason for the Season.  I love it all.

I love it when people wish me well in whatever way their particular beliefs phrase it.  When people wish me well, who am I to get all huffy and indignant and insulted, just because someone wished me well in the language of another culture?  I’m HONORED!  I thank people when they wish me well.  What difference does it make how it was phrased?  Quite honestly?  People who are insulted and angered when somebody smiles and wishes them well, just because it was done in an unfamiliar way, well, I consider such people to be nasty prissy joy-bashers who really, really need to get a life and pay attention to the world. It ain’t all about YOU, ya know.

Please!  Wish me a Happy Kwanzaa, or a Happy Hannukah, or Season’s Greetings, or Merry Christmas, or Happy Christmas, or Joyous Santa Lucia Day, or Happy Winter Solstice, or Merry Las Posadas, or Happy Holidays, or Blessed Christmas, or Happy Winter Thick Fur-Growing Squirrel Preparations.  I love it.  Thank you!  Thank you, for including me, with your greeting,  in your plans for celebration and happiness!  I haven’t got a clue what some of your greetings might mean, but since when was THAT important?  I just think it’s nice that you shared.

1.  The true innocent are those who not only are guiltless themselves but who thank others are.  –Josh Billings

2.  Nothing more detestable does the earth produce than an ungrateful man.  –Ausonius  (This one’s for people who are insulted by other people’s joy-sharing.)

3.  Anger and intolerance are the twin enemies of correct understanding.  –Gandhi

4.  Duct tape is like the Force.  It has a light side, and a dark side, and it holds the universe together.  –Carl Zevanzig

5.  The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.  –Muriel Rukeyser

6.  If people concentrated on the really important things in life, there’d be a shortage of fishing poles.  –Doug Larsen

7.  One of my old formulas is to be an enthusiast in the front part of your heart, and ironical in the back.  –Oliver Wendell Holmes

8.  The facts, although interesting, are irrelevant.  –Anonymous

9.  In most of mankind, gratitude is merely a secret hope of further favors.  –Francois La Rochefoucauld

10.  God is subtle, but He is not malicious.  –Einstein

11.  . . . Grammar, which can govern even Kings.  –Moliere

12.  God never made His work for man to mend.  –John Dryden

13.  A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.  –O.W. Holmes

14.  We are here on earth to do good for others.  What the others are here for, I do not know.  –W.H. Auden

15.  Greatness lies not in being strong, but in the right using of strength.  –Henry Ward Beecher

16.  Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the omnipresent God bursts through everywhere.  –Emerson

17.  The reluctance to put away childish things may be a requirement for genius.  –Rebecca Pepper Sinkler

18.  Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head.  –Arthur Shopenhauer

19.  Always remember that the person that you find fault with a great deal, will finally rebel.  –E.W. Howe

20.  A fool does not enter a room, nor leave it, nor sit down, nor rise up, nor is he silent, nor does he stand on his legs, like a man of sense.  –Jean de la Breyeire

21.  To those who can dream, there is no such place as faraway.  –Anonymous

22.  There is a great difference between knowing a thing and understanding it.  You can know a lot about something and not really understand it.  –Charles F. Kettering

23.  He who lives without folly is hardly so wise as he thinks.  –La Rouchefoucauld

24.  It is the enemy whom we do not suspect who is the most dangerous.  –Fernando de Rojas

25.  No man is justified in doing evil on the grounds of expediency.  –T. Roosevelt

26.  Experience is a good school, but the fees are high.  –Heine

27.  It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values.  He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good.  Otherwise he – with his specialized knowledge – more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person.  –Einstein

28. Evereything worthwhile, everything of any value, has a price.  The price is effort.  –Loretta Young

29.  The best education in the world is that got by struggling to get a living.  –Wendell Phillips

30.  Etiquette means behaving yourself a little better than is absolutely necessary.  –Will Cuppy

31.  The most instructive experiences are those of everyday life.  –Nietzsche

32.  As soon as we do evil, the evil appears as a sort of duty.  –Simone Weil

33.  Experience is in the fingers and head.  The heart is inexperienced.  –Thoreau

34.  No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched.  –George Jean Nathan

35.  To ignore the facts does not change the facts.  –Andy Rooney

36.  If one asks for success and prepares for failure, he will get the situation he has prepared for.  –Florence Shinn

37.  The world, like an accomplished hostess, pays most attention to those whom it will soonest forget.  –John C. Collins

38.  I like pigs.  Dogs look up to us.  Cats look down on us.  Pigs treat us as equals.  –Winston Churchill

39.  Neither human applause nor human censure is to be taken as the test of truth; but either should set us upon testing ourselves.  –Richard Whately

40.  However rare true love is, true friendship is rarer.  –La Rouchefoucauld

41. Education is that which remains if one has forgotten everything he learned in school.  –Einstein

42.  None of us knows what the next change is going to be, what unexpected opportunity is just around the corner, waiting to change all the tenor of our lives.  –Kathleen Norris

43. All that one gains by falsehood is not to be believed when he speaks the truth.  –Hosea Ballou

44.  When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.  –George Eliot

45.  Victory is what happens when ten thousand hours of training meet up with one moment of opportunity.  –Anonymous

46.  You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other.  –John Adams (to Jefferson)

47.  Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.  –Marston Bates

48.  Blessed are the risk takers, for they shall bring us tomorrow.  –Daniel Yovich

49.  If you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.  –Erica Jong

50.  I’m a self-made man, but I think if I had it to do over again, I’d call in someone else.  –Roland Young

Me too, Roland.

And now, according to the customs of my own personal culture, I will bid you all “Good Night,” whether you like it or not.  Any nightmares you might have because someone wished a peaceful sleep for you will NOT be my fault.