24 days until the holidays... I know because the Santa nutcracker on the entertainment center in our living room tells me so.

Four days ago our living room was in the throes of autumn, with lovely fall decorations everywhere -- rustic autumn leaves wrapped around wood and copper and bronze ornaments on the mantle, a huge and beautiful cornucopia my wife made herself two years ago atop one of the bookshelves, a big stuffed turkey on top of the entertainment center.  Then the most delicious  Thanksgiving dinner in my personal history (entirely prepared by my ever talented wife, with hamhanded 'assistance' from yours truly, and celebrated this year with all the kids, too) came and went (along with one of the most historic nationally televised Turkey Day pastings of the Detroit Lions ever), and we found ourselves sucked in to the dizzying Christmas whirl.  

Now, our living room, as well as both bathrooms, the kitchen, and the comic book hallway, firmly reflect the Yuletide season, and we're all exhausted from the effort... which is only 2/3s done, as weather and relative fragility due to recent sicknesses have prevented us from getting up the outside decorations as yet.

I'm targeting this weekend as a hopeful date to complete that stage.

I love this time of year; the holidays (starting with Halloween and stretching to New Years) and especially Christmas itself (from Black Friday through the Day) are always much too short and precious a time for me.  I enjoyed the Christmas month even back in my miserable bachelor days, kind of idly and in a bittersweet fashion, and now that I have a wife and kids to share them with, I find them to be generally a joyous occasion indeed, unmixed with the gut twisting loneliness they once used to instill in me.  

There's more stress to them this year, though.  Our financial circumstances are not as dire as they could be, as long as Congress keeps extending my Unemployment benefits, but the perpetual strain my continuing joblessness places on our fragile domestic economy cannot help but be somewhat corrosive to the holiday spirit around here.  It's entirely fair, of course, that my personal failures should harsh my buzz somewhat, but it kills me that it so dampens the seasonal joy for my family.

Worse, of course, is that the wisest and most knowledgeable among us all opine sagely that this is going to get worse before it gets better, and how much worse, none of them will hazard a guess.  

Will we all be trundling wheelbarrows full of nearly worthless hundred dollar bills up to the supermarket cash registers in six to eighteen months, while the wily wealthy rub their gold krugerands together and smirk knowledgeably at each other from behind their tinted, bulletproof limousine windows?   

Will I finally find work on a Federally funded works project somewhere, rebuilding a national highway infrastructure we don't need and will never use as the global oil supply continues to mercilessly deplete, and a ruined America with its broken military and worthless currency can only watch helplessly as China and Russia suck up the steadily lessening dregs of crude that continue to ooze and trickle out into the international marketplace?  

Will I have to scramble to secure a precarious position with some local warlord, or just hide out in my basement trying to keep my kids from breathing too loudly as the scavenging cannibal gangs sift through the empty boxes stacked up outside the storage room door, hoping they'll give up before they find us?

My deepest fear, of course, is the starkly realistic realization that, as older, wiser, more authoritative and infinitely wealthier heads confer on a new economic engine to drive us out of the current quagmire, their primary point of contention is, as Westinghouse once reputedly asked Tesla -- "where do we put the meter?"

I don't mind my tax dollars going towards some kind of grand mutual civilization with a built in social safety net for the worst off among us; I won't do well in a lawless anarchy where the lights don't work and the furnaces don't start up and the pipes won't pump hot water, and I truly believe that all societies are fundamentally measured by how well they take care of their weakest and most helpless members.  You can increase my taxes and I'll pay them with a smile, as long as I have a decent job and I'm sure that a good part of my payroll deduction is going to help those that need it most.

I am, however, getting sick of watching my labor, and the labor of millions like me, go to prop up the exorbitantly decadent lifestyles of multi-million and -billionaires who, when asked if they might be willing to give something back in exchange for the mountains of steadily devaluating cash they are asking for to bail out the companies they have run into the ground, respond as Ford CEO Alan Mullaly recently did -- "I think I'm OK where I am".  

These people have wrecked the world while lining their pockets, and when asked to put something back in the pot now, well, they're okay where they are.

Bleak, bleak holiday thoughts.

Best to think that America's own Magical Negro, despite a disturbing proclivity for appointing the same corporate lackeys who got us into this mess in the first place to positions of power in his own administration, will, nonetheless, somehow pass a miracle and save our happy consumer culture for another generation.

Hey, at least a Democrat won the election.

Ho ho ho.


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Postscript -- sorry, this post went to a much darker place than I intended it to when I first sat down to type it.  As Stephen King once noted, at 4 in the morning, you're either asleep or staring around yourself in utter despair, with no middle ground... the paint is off that gaudy old whore, the world, and there are no illusions left in the dark, cold gun barrel of the predawn.  

Sometimes the dark place is the only place you can find.

I thank whatever karmic dregs I have built up over the course of a mostly wasted lifetime that I somehow stumbled onto my wife and step-children, and if I were a praying man, I would mostly pray that I can somehow find a way to bring them the things they need and want in the days ahead.  I wish I had more faith in my own individual resourcefulness, but, well, if this and other past blogs of mine reflect anything, it's a complete lack of that.  

Still, things could get better.  You never know.  

It's sad that that's really as upbeat as I can be right now, but, well, there it is.

Reprinted, as always, from The Miserable Annals of the Earth.  (If you don't understand that title reference, you're probably not geeky enough to enjoy my blog, so don't bother hitting the link.)