The Annual Christmas Blog Post

The what, you ask? The annual… what?

I understand your confusion. The blogosphere isn’t what it once was. That vast, chaotic wilderness of wildly swirling anarchy that made the most lawless Wild West towns look like nursing home tea parties has faded to a mild and corporatist kitten of its former self, so there’s really no place for the average internetizen to experience this former staple of the basement keyboard warrior.

So I’ll explain. The Annual Christmas Blog Post is, at its core, a blog post. This blog post was written and posted once per year, and it in some way recognizes, describes, uplifts, and/or celebrates the Christmas season or Christmas Day itself.

Ideally, this post should be written pre-Christmas and posted just before or, if possible, on December 25 each year. This can be problematic: families frequently frown on Christmas Day blogging. Luckily, most blog platforms allow for scheduled posts.*

How does one write a Christmas Day Blog Post? Glad you asked.

First, choose your subgenre. Examples:

• Humor: avoid Chevy Chase references, if possible.  He's not funny.
• Nostalgic: childhood memories, or memories of young children are great.
• Sappy: for those of you who cut your own Christmas trees.
• Traditional: kind of like nostalgic, but with less nostalgia.
• Christian: nice to recognize Jesus now and then.
• Cynical: it’s a pagan holiday! It’s capitalist propaganda!

There are others, of course, and of course many of these intersect in the Great Venn Diagram of Blogging.  

Next, the basic construction. While there is no end to the combinations  and structures a writer might use, I find this to be the most effective:

• Part one: a short anecdote, usually from the Traditional subgenre with a hint of Humor. 

One could simply start the post with something basic like “It’s Christmas!”, but one should keep in mind that the reader already knows it's Christmas, and isn’t reading your blog to find out what day it is.

• Part two: a short explanation of what the anecdote means today.
• Part three: expansion on the above.

This is where you include humorous references to shopping, weather, decorating, overeating, kids (young, teenaged, home for the holiday), in-laws, etc.

Please note that humor, in this context, will work even if you are writing a serious and/or cynical post.  Lance's Xth Rule of Blogging**: if you don't make them smile, they'll never read to the end. 

• Part four: a more recent but related anecdote.

Ideally, with a strong implication of roots in either the earlier anecdote or the main subgenre of your post.

• Part five: the conclusion. 

This will usually at least touch on the sappy subgenre, unless you’ve gone heavy on the cynical subgenre.

And there you have it: the Annual Christmas Blog Post.

Side note: I realize that I'm demanding what seems like an awful lot of anecdotes.  Worry not, it's not that hard.  Christmas traditions are traditions, which means they happen every year, and they already have something in common: Christmas.  It practically writes itself.

Now: I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering why I don’t just write an Annual Christmas Blog Post, to give you a real example of what I’m talking about.   

My answer: Christmas was two days ago.  It's too late.  Check in again next year.

Maybe.

Next week: the Annual New Year’s Blog Post. 

*At least, the two blogging platforms I've used do this.

** Lance's Rules of Blogging is an ongoing, meta-evolving, pan-amorphous project that has not yet been fully compiled.  Since it hasn't been compiled, a priority system has not been set.  Since a priority system has not been set, Lance's Rules of Blogging cannot yet be numbered.  We do not regret any confusion.

Life After the Snooze Button

My alarm clock is broken.  Not the clock part.  That works fine.  Not the alarm part, either.  That still howls its annoying, penetrating buzz-slash-whine at the exact moment I told it to, several hours ago.  

It's the snooze button.  My snooze button isn't working. I press it, the alarm stays on.

It's awful.

Maybe it shouldn't be.  Maybe I should just be able to get up out of bed when the alarm goes off, like the wife in "Babe."  Alarm goes off, she's up and running.  Her mouth.  A real talker, that one.  Yikes.

But, alas, I'm not like that.  Bed is never so comfy as that moment when the alarm goes off, and at that moment 51-year-old me has a lot in common with 8-year-old me: I just want five more minutes.  

Four more minutes?  Three?

Twenty-seven, actually.  Yeah, I hit my snooze button three times.  I actually factor that in to how I set my alarm: I know I'm going to want a few snooze alarms, so I set the initial alarm that much earlier.

I wonder if that's normal.  I also wonder: does every snooze button reset the alarm for nine minutes?  And if so, why?  Who chose the number nine?

Heh.  Got that song stuck in your head now, I bet.  

But back to the issue at hand.  No snooze alarm.  Now I'm stuck with a few other options: get out of bed right away; let myself just lie there a bit and risk falling back to sleep; or bringing a backup system to bear, like my phone.  

Problem #1: get out of bed right away when the alarm goes off?  What am I, a caveman?

Problem #2: if I fall back to sleep, I might be late for work.  I may not have the most important job in the world, but there are people depending on me to do it.  If I don't show up... well, I dunno.  It would at least put my department a couple hours behind for the day.

Problem #3: I don't like bringing my phone to bed.  I don't want to hear it ring, as small as that risk is at night, and our plug space in that area is limited.  Plus, I hate the way my phone's alarm sounds, and I don't know how to change it.

Get off my lawn.

The obvious solution is: go get another alarm clock, which brings us to Problem #4: Christmas is less than a week away, and we have a rule against buying ourselves things at this time of year.

I once heard a comedian say that the snooze button is the end of civilization as we know it.  The snooze button, he said, means: when the alarm goes off, I'm not getting up.

It's kind of true, and kind of not.  I mean, even with the snooze button, it's still my alarm getting me out of bed on time.  

And anyway, I like to think of this as an example of the adaptability of mankind.  We're adaptable.  We think we couldn't possibly live without this, or in that kind of place, or if this other thing happened, but I bet we'd all be surprised by what we can get used to.

Point being, we've adapted to the snooze alarm.  I've adjusted my alarm-clock habits to include my snooze-button habits, and I'll bet a lot of you readers (snort) have, too.*

But here's the problem with that nice little bit of logic: if I'm really so adaptable, I should be able to adapt to life without a snooze alarm.  

But do I want that?

* In fact, I bet every single person who reads this sets the alarm clock earlier than necessary in order to accommodate snooze alarm usage.

Moving Things from One Place to Another Place

Imagine, for a moment, that you're a sweater.  A brand new sweater, just off the factory floor in, let's say, Malaysia.  You've got a long trip ahead of you.

The first thing that happens is: you're placed in a box with a bunch of other sweaters.  That box becomes part of a stack of similar boxes.  You are then (probably) staged in a secondary spot and loaded onto a truck; then staged again; then loaded onto a ship; then moved off the ship; then moved again; then put on a train; then taken off the train and onto another truck; then into a warehouse; then onto yet another truck.  Possibly to a second warehouse.  Another truck, and finally into a store.  You spend a few days “in the back” before someone carries you out and places you on a shelf.

All those movements.  All those vehicles.  All those people whose only job was, literally, to move you from one place to another place, and nobody’s even tried you on yet!

Look around the room you’re in.  Everything in it – everything – went through a very similar chain of events before you put it where it is now.

I drive a forklift for a living these days, which means my livelihood comes entirely from this act: the act of moving things from one place to another place.

Not doing anything with those things.  That’s not my job.  Not making, or changing, or fixing, or even looking at them.  Just moving them.  I pick a thing up in one spot, I put it down in another spot.  Sometimes I’ll move it a second time, and sometimes even a third.  Other times, it’s someone else’s job to move it that second/third/fourth time. 

Eventually, those things get to a spot where somebody does something with them.  Examines them, replaces them, communicates with the person who sent them.  But not me.  I only move them.

Okay, that’s not true.  I do that other part, too.  Roughly half of my worktime, I’m one of the people in the immediately preceding paragraph.  I examine, replace, communicate, bag, and then place those things on a conveyor belt so other people can do other things to them.  

After those people are done, I can only guess. I think fairies and ley lines become involved at that point.

That part of my job – the non-forklift part – has its bright points.  It’s the kind of job where you can listen to music of an audio book while you’re working, and there’s just enough variety to keep it interesting.  

But the forklift part of my job is way better.  It’s a little bit physical – I’m moving around all the time – it requires some initiative, and I get to drive a forklift.  Two kinds of forklifts, in fact.  It can get a little nervous, because there’s a lot going on around me.  A lot of people, a lot of stuff, and one very inconveniently placed steel beam.  

It was scuffed like that when I got here, I swear.

I'd only been forklifting for a week when I realized: my job is - literally - moving things from one place to another.  That’s it.  That’s the entirety of this job.  One hundred percent.

That’s what I get paid for.

A truck backs into a bay.  I take a forklift and move stacks of enormous boxes off the truck.  I stack them in another place.  Then, later, I unstack them and move them to a third, nearby place.  Still later, I use a hand truck to move them onto a machine that dumps their contents onto a conveyor belt.  The other half of my job is at the other end of that conveyor belt, but we’re not talking about that right now.

Other times, I only move the stuff off the truck once.  Someone else then moves it, usually onto another truck, where yet another person will move that stuff to yet another place.

And other times, somebody else moves the stuff off the truck and I’m the one who moves it the second time, usually to a freight elevator where – c’mon, take a guess – yet another person moves it onto the elevator and then to someplace else.

And that’s just what happens inside our building.  Think about how many times those things were moved before they got to us.  How many people moved each box!  Imagine, for a moment, just how vast the “moving things from one place to another place” industry must be.  I mean, these boxes didn’t just appear at my worksite.  A truck driver brought them there.  They didn’t just appear on the truck, either.  Somebody moved them onto that truck.  Somebody moved them to the spot where that guy could move them onto the truck.

Naturally, this brings me to teleportation.  Once we invent that, most of this will go away, right?  Well, maybe.  Maybe someday, a sweater removed from an upscale boutique shelf will be instantly replaced with another sweater, zapped directly from another shelf in Malaysia (or, more likely, the Gale Crater on Mars) to which it was zapped moments after being created.

Of course, by that time, we’ll have been largely replaced by our technological and mechanical overlords and, to the extent that things like sweaters and upscale boutiques exist at all, it will only be to help keep us occupied and out of our betters’ way.

Until then, we’ll have to settle for being dominated by the people who move things from one place to another.  Yes, fine, I see you, people who fix the things we use to move things.  I know, we couldn’t do our jobs without you.

But where did your tools come from, huh?