Miss Crankypants dreads this time of year. She pouts. Not so much because she’s anti-Christmas or even anti-Snooty Claus, as the little girl from “Peanuts” would say. No. The writer in Miss CP hates December for all the right reasons. Number one on the countdown? Every year she watches commercials for Lexus (Lexi?) cars with gigantic red bows on the roofs, but she has yet to find one waiting for her on Christmas morning.
Number Two? Sandy fudge.
Writers who routinely set their kitchens ablaze while rescuing their husbands with broken legs stranded in the woods (you know who you are!) can’t resist the urge to cook up a batch of the gooey stuff “just like Grandma used to make.” As usual, the fudge burns and the writer still insists on gifting the rest of us with fudge that’s as gritty as the dunes on the Florence, Oregon beach. You say you bit down on a walnut and broke a tooth? It was really a sand dollar and good luck getting your insurance to cover the root canal.
Next on the list has to be the lovable writers who love Christmas so much they start decorating on the Fourth of July. As Miss CP hints in her debut column for Book Fun Magazine (coming soon!), these year-round Christmasteers drive the rest of us crazy with their blinding 100,000 LED light displays and hand carved eight tiny reindeer that really fly! The neighbors are so jealous!
And don’t get her started on the color-coordinated tree, gift wrap and table runner.
Miss Crankypants would just as soon make use of last week’s funny papers and call it good. That is, when she finally runs out of the gift wrap and bows she’s been re-using for the past twenty years. All the bows are squished and lean to the side, as if an elephant sat on them. No wait, that was Aunt Mary last year when she got a bit too far into the “grown-up’s” egg nog and knocked over the tree. She probably took five years off the life of some of those flattened bows–and no amount of magic tape can save them.
But back to Lexi Cars. Miss Crankypants is begging the TV ad makers to cut poor writers everywhere a little slack on those “Christmas Sales Event” car commercials. Who gets a brand-new Lexus for Christmas? And how do they make those ginormous bows that sit on the car roofs? Even if Miss Cranky received a present like that, she’d have to rent a storage unit for the bow, because, you know it’s a sin to throw a perfectly usable bit of gift wrap. Maybe she could just wrap up Aunt Mary, stick a bow on her and let the neighbors figure out what it means.