Obama poster Bloutout™

Feeling a wee bit too productive at work because of the inauguration coming atcha? Have an excess of Hope and Change to burn off as we bid Bush ado? Have you met: Obaniconme?

Not since the great personalized M&M debacle have I wasted this much time customizing something for friends and family.

Let's meet Kate's supporting players!


The Kosher Cupcake I used to babysit.


Here she is testing out my glasses.


KC and another baby friend enjoying a snack.


My brother modeling his second-favorite Christmas present after the blanket "so soft it makes me wish I had polio."


My mom, looking like a dame from a noir film.


My dad, showing off my parents' comically oversized remote.


Hey, and speaking of things that are comically oversized, it's the previously discussed pink bunny pants...


...which - I wasn't exaggerating - really were big enough for my sister and me.

But I don't want to be a bunny!

Like all families, mine has certain Christmas traditions we must abide by. My dad writes silly notes from Santa on our gifts, there's an all-out holy war for control of the heat and - my favorite tradition of all - we haul down my mom's kitchen crucifix to replace it with a nutcracker cookie cutter. Tis the season.

My mom is easily the most religious person I know, so it's great fun that she allows this, with the technicality that "Jesus is in our hearts" or somesuch.

With the Lord safely removed from our kitchen, we took to looking up the schedule for Christmas mass. I heard a gasp from my mom, some conferring in the kitchen with my dad, then a guffaw from my brother.

That's right. On the holiest day of the Liturgical calendar, we overslept for Holy Spirit's 9 a.m. mass and thought we could catch St. Joe's 10:30. We could have too, except that their mass was at 10. I was putting on a final coat of mascara on as the (bad?) news came in. I sat down and ate another cinnamon roll.

To put this in perspective, my mom missing Christmas mass is like John Roberts oversleeping for the first day of Supreme Court.

"Nobody get out of fancy clothes! We're taking a family picture!" Dad worked through his disappointment through photography.

Then, still basking in our reprieve from the governor, we sat down to open our gifts.

Mom got a GPS system. Know where that could have lead us to? Church.
Kevin got a nice new coat. Know where that would've looked smashing? Church.
Dad got a bottle of Jameson's. Know where that would've been happily passed in a flask? Pew three at St. Joe's.

I'd mentioned in passing to my mom that I think I'd put on a few pounds when the weather got cold. What followed was either a show of support for my comfort, or a cruel, cruel joke...

I excitedly opened the box. Pants. Pink, fuzzy pj pants. I tugged on one leg and the material kept coming, like a handkerchief up a clown's sleeve.

I would have never have been able to fit into these even the week before I birthed octuplets. My sister and I each climbed into a leg and hopped down the hall.

With that merriment behind us, we all retired for some TV watching and computer time. My mom checked CNN headlines and announced Eartha Kitt had died. Then she announced Eartha was a whore.

We all let out a collective WHAAAAAAAA? as mom nonchalantly walked into the kitchen. I never did figure out what she was talking about. Was it this passage in the story?

Offstage, however, Kitt described herself as shy and almost reclusive.

"I'm an orphan. But the public has adopted me and that has been my only family," she told the Post online.

So what did we learn about my mom this year?: She hates the Baby Jesus, thinks I'm fat and has a personal vendetta with Eartha Kitt.

Merry Christmas to all.

Joe the plumber 2012! UPDATE: With bonus grammar

The media may have plunged into covering McCain and Obama fighting like Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger over custody of Joe the Plumber last night, but they missed the real story: McCain is going to eat Obama's hindquarters! That's so in the tank for McCain of them to not warn Barry!

In my newspaper days, I spent a decent chunk of my downtime combing through the AP wire photos for the most embarrassing pictures of President Bush I could find. At Christmas, my friend/fellow prisoner R. Justin took the highlights and stuck them on the office's Christmas tree. Then I made everyone Festivus poles out of paper clips. Holidays! This picture would have been the star on top of the tree.


Hello, msnbc.com, my old friend! What belongs to the "McCains' " in that sentence? Besides America's heart, obviously.

Hey, that's better!

Christmas Story Part 2: A very Hector Flores Christmas

Against all odds, the Fung Wah delivered me in one piece (albeit with a small bleeding spot on my scalp). Yes, I am a hero.

I go from solo traveler to someone enveloped in a family. Red shows up with her dad, and I’m told a story that I immediately know will change my life: the ballad of Hector Flores. It must’ve been like shepherds hearing about a babe in a manger.

Red (who works at an elementary school, by the way) was in a meeting about a first grader having trouble. The obligatory 100-year-old kindergarten teacher/town buttinski leans over the table and confides, “Well that’s no surprise, you know who his father is, don’t you? Hector Flores” in a tone meant to make everyone gasp “Not THE Hector Flores?”

Apparently he’s the town’s simpleton Lothario (my new favorite phrase) and has, as Red put it, been kind enough to contribute to the town’s elementary school population boom. All with academic trouble, none with the last name Flores. (Hector is a love ’em and leave ’em kind of guy. He doesn’t leave his mark.)

Hector popped up repeatedly through the weekend. He generously brought Red’s mom several gifts, leaving the sign of the H on the tags, not unlike Zorro.

Red’s an only child, and her parents took me in as one of their own. (In a bit of corporate humbuggery, I couldn’t get paid this week unless I was at my desk, even though the office is technically closed. There’s no work to do today, so I may post several times.)

Her mom made me a welcome basket with cookies, Cape Cod shell candy and other goodies. That was more than enough treats for me, but they also got me Christmas presents and filled a stocking. I was speechless.

I also got to meet their neighbors. Red was explaining that the mom is “a young 40,” and “gives us all hope about getting older.” But I still wasn’t prepared for my introduction to her being her standing on her couch, conducting with wooden spoons.

Red’s mom and dad are the 7 and 8 year old kids’ godparents, and they literally had to drive their SUV across the street with gifts because it was more than four people could carry. For the next hour, the kids opened presents while we drank wine and ate cheese and crackers. They were the perfect kids, totally grateful and excited about the gifts without being insanely wild. At one point, the daughter opened up a soft sweater and hugged it saying “It’s beautiful and just what I always wanted” before trailing off into a blissful sigh. It’s fun to have rent-a-kids for the holidays. You need someone in the house to sprinkle reindeer food, track the sleigh and be fully prepared to hop into bed early because your babysitter has threatened to call Santa.

In addition to drinking my body weight in mulled cider and lighting luminaries I also got the pleasure of meeting her mom’s old friend Bonnie, one of those people who—instead of just nodding politely while someone tells a story—confronts them with, “What do you mean? Why is that funny?” Good times, Bon. Glad you came out.

We watched “White Christmas,” from like the ’50s, which was pleasant enough, but the real fun came at the end, when star of the silver screen Rosemary Clooney decided to share the most passive aggressive memories about her costars. Among the gems:

“She was the dearest friend. We traded Christmas cards for years until my list got to be over 600 people. It was just too long. I still think of her fondly though.”
Red yells out from the back: “Did she just say she bumped someone from the Christmas card list?”

“We were supposed to perform for the king of Greece, but when Bing found out he went ‘Not me’ and hopped the fence to go golfing, leaving us all lip-synching.”

“I remember there was one line in the song that Bert loved, and he’d sing it really loudly. I’ll never forget that line, it was just so funny to hear him sing it so loud….anyway….” (goes on to another anecdote.) Red: “What was the line, Ro?”

I may have to be at work, not working, this week, but I’ve come back refreshed, stuffed from good food, sore from laughing and restocked with a year’s supply of lotion. And, as with my night with Hector Flores, I’ll always remember it fondly.

A Christmas Story in three parts. Part 1: Putting the fun in Fung Wah

I took the Fung Wah, aka the Chinatown bus, to Massa chusetts for a proper New England Christmas with my friend who lent me her family for the holidays. Luckily they were worth it, because the Fung Wah tested my tenacity. Any bus that will take you to Boston for $15 cuts corners somewhere, and in the case of the Fung Wah, that comes at the expense of English-speaking bus drivers, overhead bins with doors and the requiste pointing-out-of-the-exits routine. (There was no announcement at any point before departure, they simply took off when the bus was full. How refreshing that they treated us like adults who can figure out the obvious, I thought, until I realized all the emergency signs were in Chinese.)

On the plus side, they are liberal with their passenger lists, so although I had tickets for the 10 a.m. bus, they encouraged me to hop on the "9:15." It wasn't until I got to Boston that we discovered that there was no 9:15. How delightfully horror movie! Also, there was a small, pale little girl running up and down the asiles who looked like a little girl who died 30 years ago that day. Wonder what that was about.

Before the bus even leaves, the woman in the row next to me starts going to town on some yogurt. My first thought was "Oh, lovely! That's perfect bus food. Quiet and unsmelly." That was before I looked over to see her licking the spoon. The lid. The inside of the container. Like she was Alanis Morissette in the back row of the theater. This exercise was repeated twice more.

Because you only seem to hear about the Fung Wah in conjunction with phrases like "drove off the overpass" or "flipped three times" or see it with photos of dazed Chinese senior citizens wandering the highway, jokes flew about me wearing a precatutionary Special Olympics helmet. At one point we crossed a bridge in total fog, zero visibility, and I figured I should help out the beat reporter who draws the assignment and just go ahead and write the accident story lede and pin it to myself.

Red calls with about a half hour left in the trip. "Are you surviving? Use your helmet yet?" she asked, and for her touble got me screaming "Christ! Ouch! The fuck?" as at that exact moment a binder fell directly on my head from the overhead bin. I like to think it's a metaphor for the whole Fung Wah.

Coming (at some point):
Part 2: A Hector Flores Christmas, and Part 3: My Triumphant Return.

Fa-la-la-la-ZZZZZZZZZ

The three most underwhelming Christmas songs:

3. Feliz Navidad — Please note that the singer and his merry band of assembled children never actually get around to wishing you a merry Christmas (in English at least). They just keep saying that they want to. Well you know what singer-I-won’t-make-the-effort-to-Google? I wanted to get you a present, but I didn’t. Please just treat my intent to as an actual gift.

2. Do they know it’s Christmas time at all? — No they don’t, Sir Bob Geldof, they’re from Ethiopia, which is a predominately Muslim nation. Do you know that the nation is more animist (Animism: the belief in personalized, supernatural beings (or souls) that often inhabit ordinary animals and objects, governing their existence.) than Christian?
Fun Kate fact: Do you know sometimes I’ll Wikipedia things even though I just said I wouldn’t Google something?)
I’m still waiting for the sequel “Do they know it’s Chinese New Year after all?” for the good people of New Orleans. Update: Still no snow in Africa this Christmas. It’s not looking too promising next year either.

1. Little Saint Nick — Christmas comes this time each year? Are you kidding me?!?!?! This is what we like to call “phoning it in” Brian Wilson. Could you stifle your yawn long enough to get out the chorus? It sounds like you wrote it during a commercial break and recorded it as soon as you dug up an old xylophone and a brother to sing falsetto. A sample: He don't miss no one /when he's haulin' through the snow at a frightening speed/With a half a dozen deer with Rudy to lead/He's got to wear shades cause the snow really flies/and he's cruisin' every path with a little surprise.

Also, the song ends with “little Saint Nick” and the bracketed instruction to “Repeat for a long time.” That’s the song equivalent of me just trailing off at the end of my entries with “blah blah blah” or maybe even Zzzzzzzzzzzzz…

To sum up. It is December. Christmas comes in December. We, the Beach Boys, like cars, to the point of shoehorning car/sleigh metaphor together. Pay me royalties or I’m locking myself back in my room.

Maybe I’m just bitter because Brian Wilson almost took my hand off last Christmas. I went to watch him pull an Ashlee Simpson lip-synching-stavaganza while taping a special for NBC. Because my dad is the only one I know who might like the Beach Boys, I called him when Brian was done.

Me: I was like three feet from him. You’ll see when it airs tomorrow. Man is he a bad lip-syncher! Did he have a stroke?
Dad: That’s so cool. Remember when you put me on the phone with Ed Helms? (Editor’s note: See entry “Ohmigah! It’s Ed Helms!”)
Brian Wilson turns corner to enter limo.
Me: Ohmigah! It’s Brian Wilson! Mr. Wilson, will you say hi to my dad?

I hand the phone to him and he takes it, attempting to shut the car door at the same time, nevermind that my hand is between the door and the car.

Brian: Hi Dad.

He hands the phone back as I cry out the hilariously succinct “My hand!”

And just like that, he was gone, with a cry of “Merry Christmas to all and to all" zzzzzzzzzzzzz......