Xavier Has Risen

I got to Mom's on Christmas morn, my face as smooth as the bottom of a sugarplum, which happened to be nearby so I could compare.

"Oh, you shaved!" Mom cried with wild joy. "Oh, and you're wearing the sweater I got you!"

"Yes."

"Where's the eggnog? spiked with cyanide?"

Mom was watching A Christmas Karen, but she had fast-forwarded to the end where the sappiness reaches its maximum saturation point. 

Mom smiled. "I only like the end where he gives out all the presents."

"Hmm," I said. "We seem to be operating from two different theories of film. I only watch the beginning part, where Scrooge robs people of their joy. After that, I turn it off."

"You're awful. But thanks for shaving that awful thing on your face."

"I still have it, if you'd like to make a blanket of it?"

 

Godspeed, little doodle (of hair).

Jonah was reading this blog post. "No, no, no," he said. "What happened to a Very Perry Christmas? I thought you were going to make fun of Perry Heistmann?"

"Yeah," I said, no longer writing this and reading it before I wrote it. "I don't think people are going to be as delighted with that as you are. Would be."

"Who cares about their delight?"

"Touche."

Perry Heistmann was a regular at the library who oppressed the clerk staff with his incessant demands to copy pages of recondite scholastic twaddle and who never checked the books out and who insisted on having the bypass key for the copier and the stapler and he appreciated it and who molested children.

"Can you get me the bypass key?

And your underage daughter?"

"No, no, no," Pat said, not never reading this blog. "I thought you were going to write about how I punched an EMT in Pueblo and now my dad is using robots to steal my underwear?"

"Well..."

"No, no, no," Andy said. "There'll be none of that shit."

Just then a mind-liquefying wail broke through the tomfoolery. Todd had dropped to his knees, his gloved hands shaking at the cruel gods.

"WHHHYYYY?!?!?"

"Sorry," I said, stroking my beard.

"You don't have a beard, idiot. That's the point!"

"Right, right."

"No, no, no," Mom said as I wrote that I was reading what I read so I could write what I would have written had I wrote it to begin with.

"Now what?"

We were leaving our Christmas dinner over at Les's. "Give me your coat," Mom said.

"Why?"

"I stuffed my holiday meat in there!"

"Ah, the beginning of another holiday tradition. God curse us, everyone!"

Hide the children!

"No," said Santa.