Enotes

So how many Christmas cards did you get this year? Are they adorning the wall? Do you have so many that they outline the closet door frame? Or are they stuffed in a holder on the coffee table, bursting? No? Not at our house, either. The Christmas card is a dinosaur---like drive-in movies and transistor radios. Nobody sends Christmas cards anymore. It's another example of how Americans today just don't like to slap a stamp on anything and ship it via the United States Postal Service. Sending Christmas cards was a feeling of accomplishment but not of gratification. I mean, you were never there to see the recipient open yours. But getting Christmas cards? Now that was some fun. They would start to come, slowly at first, usually the week after Thanksgiving. Those cards were sent by the early bird folks. But as the month of December moved along, the Christmas cards moved along with it, filling the mailbox more voluminously as the days ticked down toward December 25...

I'm beginning to think that the celebration of Fourth of July with fireworks is carrying on longer than the Revolutionary War itself. In our neighborhood, the pop-pop-pop of things with fuses starts in late-June and is still going on, and this is nearly a week after the 4th. Granted, the pace is slowing, but why are we still hearing things that go boom? If people still possess these firework-like items, what are they waiting for? Maybe I'm more sensitive to this because we have a dog, and he's not unlike many other canines who don't appreciate the rockets' red glare. Last night we set out for our evening stroll and just five minutes into it, something went boom and just like that, our pup was making a beeline for the house. I'm as patriotic as the next guy, but do we need to hear the commotion (sometimes past 11:00 p.m.) for a three-week period? I could go into the accidents, some tragic, but that's piling on. It's unfair to take pot shots be...

Happy New Year. Or happy new year, however you choose to look at it. As I watched the big ball drop on Tuesday night in Times Square, I jokingly asked my daughter what life would be like if we did that for the change of every month instead of year. "Three...two....one....HAPPY APRIL!" Seems silly, of course. But so does, when you think about it, going through all the expense and effort to mark the start of a new year. Or New Year. It's perhaps too cynical---even for me---to say that January 1 is "just another day," but it truly is. It is different, however, in one respect: It's the one day when no one has ditched their new year's (or New Year's) resolutions---yet. Ahh, about those resolutions. There's a funny commercial playing on TV right now where a small boy calls it the New Year's " revolutions." I kind of like that. You do have to revolt, in a way, if you're going to commit to doing something different fr...

By the time you read this, the turkey is likely in the oven, or in your stomach. The football game is on the television---and that is probably the case, as there is football on the tube from 12:30 until 11:30 at night. The family arguments are either in full swing or the cops have been called. And the cranberry sauce was forgotten in the fridge. It's kind of routine on Thanksgiving for bloggers to make a laundry list of things they're thankful for. I could do that; after all, I am just as blessed as the next guy. But I thought it might be fun to present to you a list of what other people should be thankful for---if I may be so bold. Detroit mayor-elect Mike Duggan should be thankful for Tom Barrow, and the ne'er do-wells who tried to keep Duggan off the ballot. The Republicans should be thankful for Obamacare's shaky rollout, for taking the GOP's ridiculous efforts to shut down the government off the front page. Comedians should continue to be thankful for...

Yes, that's Easter that is showing up at the tail end of your March calendar. It's the most movable of all our holidays. Most of the others, we have committed to memory. December 25 and July 4, of course, are static. We also know that Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday in November. Labor Day, the first Monday in September. Martin Luther King Day comes around the middle of January. Flag Day is June 14. Halloween, October 31. But Easter? That's the "little stinker" of holidays. Sometimes it's in March, most times April. And when it is in April, it's all over the map. One of the first things I do when I check out at the calendar every year is look up when Easter is. This is one of those unusual years when Easter falls in March. But why? You may or may not know this, but Easter is determined by the spring equinox. Basically, Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox (March 21). Got that? It's...

I was never a Halloween guy, as a kid. I could take it or leave it as a youngster. Too much effort, I suppose. I never knew what I was going to dress up like, or even if I was going to go door-to-door at all, until sometimes hours before sundown on October 31. One year, I recall, I was particularly tardy with my decision. I was planning on staying in, passing out candy, when I got a phone call from a friend. It was dusk, at the very least, when the phone rang in our Livonia home. "You going baggin'?" was the question. It was my friend, Bob Bernard, who lived a couple blocks away and who I never had gone Trick or Treating with prior to that year. I still don't know what prompted the call. It wasn't that Bob and I weren't friends; we just weren't very close. Certainly not "baggin'" close. Or so I thought. I initially rebuffed his request, but he pressed me. "I don't have a costume," I pleaded. It fell on deaf ears. I h...

Do any two consecutive months on the calendar pass as quickly as November and December? I've long said it: once you get past Halloween, it's a slippery slope to the end of the year. This is both good and bad. November is almost done, just like that---as usual. Wasn't it just the other day when I was passing out candy? I say it's good and bad because the holiday season swoops in and that means more expense, more stress and more weight gained. So it's good that it all happens so fast. But it's also bad, because there doesn't seem to be enough time for everything, like shopping. More to the point, there doesn't seem to be enough time to assemble the funds needed for said shopping. Starting on November 1, Thanksgiving already begins to creep into the minds of our lovely wives, who, whether hosting the holiday feast or not, have arrangements and plans to think about. Turkey Day came relatively early this year (the earliest it can occur is November 22 and this...