A Slightly Modified Christmas

We all know that 2020 has been a little funky, both in terms of COVID completely turning our lives upside down and also in terms of how your house smells since your kids have been going to school from your living room for nine months.

Well, Christmas 2020 isn’t going to be any less funky, so buckle up, buckaroos. We’re about to have Christmas COVID style. Here’s a short rundown on how it’s going to work this year.

For starters, many of you have been putting off your family Christmas pictures due to the obvious outbreak of COVID hair. You and your spouse are almost unrecognizable to each other at this point, and your children look like the end result of a drunken hookup between Cousin It and a yeti.

You’re going to need to bite the bullet and just do it. That cutesy holiday snapshot of your family isn’t going to get any prettier, and chances are, one of your kids is pretty good with Photoshop, so there’s some hope.

Christmas cookies are going to need to be contactless this year. You can still attempt to bake tasty treats for your friends and neighbors, but it will be challenging to say the least. Since we apparently know nothing about how COVID works, we must assume that it can survive 350 degrees for 20 minutes. That means you cannot come within six feet of any of the ingredients without being in a full hazmat suit.

Extra-long mixing spoons aside, your shopping cart was probably within six feet of you, another shopper, or a clerk during the ingredient purchasing process, so you’re really finished before you even started.

Best to just bake all the treats you would have normally made as gifts, then eat them all yourself with an eggnog chaser in front of a Hallmark Christmas movie marathon.

Santa will still be at the mall, but he will be inside a large plastic bubble, so your kids won’t get to sit on his lap. Also, the mall will be closed, so the best we can do is have you drive by with the kids and wave to him through the glass doors while he’s in his plastic bubble. Also, the glass doors will be covered with plywood to prevent looting.

Santa’s North Pole workshop is still open, being deemed an essential service, however the elves now have to work in cohorts of ten, on a rotating hybrid schedule to be able to maintain a six-elf-length spacing around the work benches. If one elf tests positive for COVID, the entire cohort, and any cohorts working in an adjacent workshop area, will need to quarantine until 2021. This has the potential to affect toy production, but the good news is Amazon seems to have ramped up to fill the gaps. We should be OK.

Speaking of elves, the Elves on the Shelves are no longer allowed to return to the North Pole each night, or at all, actually, due to the cohort quarantine shelter-in-place lockdown distance learning travel restriction slow the spread flatten the curve rules. This means they will now stay in your house 24/7, which presents a problem. Homesick elves will drink heavily to mask the pain, and a drunk elf is an unpredictable elf. Hide the peppermint schnapps and the spiced rum or you will be in for some very odd and distasteful elf pranks. Let’s just say you won’t be able to trust any of the chocolates in that See’s Candy sampler, if you know what I mean.

Since the reindeer naturally quarantine in a cohort of nine, they will be ready to go on Christmas Eve. Nothing drastic has changed about Santa’s delivery method this year since he is the original social distancer. He will enter and exit your home as usual, but your Santa treats will obviously need to be modified. In lieu of a plate of cookies and a glass of milk this year, you need to leave him an unopened school lunch milk and a sealed snack-size bag of Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies, both floating in a bucket of hand sanitizer.

Speaking of hand sanitizer, that brings up the one change in Santa’s gift-giving procedures. Naturally, Santa will social distance, but even with the fur-lined winter gloves, Santa is unable to deliver your gifts in a truly contactless manner. As such, all your presents will be completely covered in hand sanitizer this year. Also, all your presents ARE hand sanitizer.

Of course, all Christmas Eve caroling will need to be done via Zoom this year. This could present a never-before-seen issue for you and your Charles Dickens-clad choir group. People on Zoom will now be able to virtually do what they always wanted to physically do in the past, but were too polite – shut the door on you. Expect a lot of black screens and audio connection “problems.” Sorry, and best of luck to you crazy kids!

And lastly, popcorn strings will not be strung on the Christmas tree this year. All homemade popcorn strings have been deemed essential emergency supplies by the federal government and therefore cannot be wasted on the tree. They will instead need to be stored in the bathroom to be used as a last alternative in the event of a catastrophic nationwide holiday toilet paper shortage.

Good luck with that, and happy holidays!

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2020 Marc Schmatjen

 

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Cookie Nough

Recently, the administrators at our middle school decided that they hate all the parents of all the kids at the school, so they held a cookie dough fundraiser to punish us.

The evil geniuses who invented the modern school cookie dough fundraiser knew how to get kids fired up about pestering their parents into giving up all their afternoon/evening free time to take them “to the neighborhood across the street where we don’t know anyone because I’ve already gone to every single house in our neighborhood and I still need to get five more sales to get the super balloon.”

At least, the evil geniuses certainly knew how to get Son Number Two fired up. Son Number One could not have cared less about the super balloon.

The stupid, cheap, Chinese, dollar store prizes associated with every level of cookie dough salesmanship suck Son Number Two in like a ping pong ball into a shop vac. He’s been to the Dollar Tree a million times, so he knows damned well how much the crap in the little student catalog actually costs, yet it never occurs to him to just ask me for five bucks. Instead, he wants to go knock on a hundred and eighty doors.

And do you know what’s even better than that? I found out yesterday that the administrators at our elementary school decided that they hate all the parents of all the kids at the school, too. Guess what Son Number Three brought home? Yep, the cookie dough fundraiser package. Are you kidding me!? I just got done with this nightmare.

And guess who Son Number Three thinks is really cool? Yep, Son Number Two. So guess what Son Number Three wants to do?

Yep. “Dad, I want to sell thirty so I can get the *insert the name of some useless plastic toy that will break within the first three minutes of him owning it, that would cost roughly seventy-two cents to purchase, but will require two hundred hours of my life to obtain*.”

We just did this!!! We’re going to have to drive to a neighborhood in another school district and just mumble the name of the school we’re fundraising for.

And let’s just forget the fact that I don’t want to do this for a second. Why do I have to do this at all? I don’t even understand the need for public school fundraisers in the first place. We live in America. We have more money than all the other countries combined.

We have so much money, we feel compelled to give a lot of it away to other countries every year. I assume those countries that receive foreign aid from the U.S. use some of it for their schools, but they also use a lot of it for stuff like new home furnishings and vacations for their top officials, too. How do we know this to be true? Because our top officials taught them how to get away with it.

And here I am in the U.S., watching my tax dollars going to buy President-for-Life Otawanabe of Guyana a new Barcalounger, while simultaneously having to stand on the sidewalk with my best “I’m sorry I brought him to your house” expression on my face while my son begs our neighbors for eighteen bucks in exchange for $1.29-worth of cookie dough. That’s just no way to live.

So, here’s my idea. Let’s stop all the foreign aid programs immediately. Instead of sending blank checks all over the world, we’ll set up the World School Checking Account. Any elementary, middle, or high school on the planet that needs money can just write a check. Money for anything – no questions asked - from a single box of copier paper to an entirely new campus with fifty state-of-the-art buildings – whatever. Get them whatever they need, and the checking account will still have loads of money to spare.

That way, every kid on earth can get a good education, and eventually none of those countries will need foreign aid anymore, and I can stop schlepping with my kids all over town begging for money in exchange for dough.

Anyway, I’ll probably be over to your place with Son Number Three around dinnertime.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2018 Marc Schmatjen

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