Today's Editor's Picks are holiday related. Just a couple more days until Christmas and then this will all be over and we can all get the holiday crap out of our heads and out of our posts and move on to things like how much winter sucks and the high expectations of Valentine's Day.

But for today, I am keeping it simple. Simple for FTTW, that is.The other editors are going wtih something about Santa and cars. I'm gonna make a list and check it twice.

FIVE THINGS I LOVE ABOUT THE HOLIDAYS

1. The lights. Something about driving through your otherwise boring neighborhood at night and seeing all the houses lit up with colors and decorations. I'm a sucker for the old fashioned kind of lights - the big ones that are just red, blue and green. Your white icicle lights look pretty and all, but there's something nicely nostalgic about those big, colored lights. (There is such a thing as overdoing it, though)

2. The traditions. I'm the kind of person who likes routine and familiarality. So it's comforting to know that every Christmas Eve I'll be at my aunt's house, like we've been since the 60's. And every Christmas morning we'll follow the same exact routine at mom's that we used to follow when we all lived there.

3. The food. Isn't that what holidays are all about? No? Well, it's a big part of it. Especially when you're Italian. Everything is about food when you're Italian. When mom's house smells like a weird mix of cookies and lasagna, Christmas must be here.

4. The week after Christmas. At my job, we're forced to take off the week between Christmas and New Year's. Using our own vacation time. Whether we want to or not. I bitch about this every single year, yet every year I'm pretty grateful to have that time off. When the kids were little, I'd try to use that time to do things with them, or just sit around the house with them in our pajamas playing with their new Christmas toys, but now that they are teenagers and have lives of their own, this week is MINE. So I sit around the house in my pajamas playing with new Christmas toys.

5. New Year's Day. This means the holidays are finally over and we can all get back to our normal lives of not spending every day bitching about how much money we are spending and how many relatives we have to kiss and how much food we ate and how cheap our bosses are. Well, we might still do that. But without the benefit of the spiked eggnog that usually precedes those rants.

FIVE THINGS I HATE ABOUT THE HOLIDAYS

1. The whole gift thing. I really do like buying gifts for people. But the stress of keeping up with my family who are notorious for overgiving, and the stress of trying to find just the right gift for everyone and the stress of spending all that money for this holiday is enough to keep me up at night. And the whole gift-getting thing too is kind of stressful, as I never know what to tell people when they ask what I want, plus with the way Christmas went for me the past ten years or so, the receiving part of give/receive is a sore point for reasons I won't get into. I do love Christmas Day. I just hate getting there.

2. The music. It's fun for a few minutes to sing a few rounds of We Wish You A Merry Christmas to get you in the mood, but about three songs into the "All Christmas music, all the time!" schtick, it gets old and my nerves. It's like Christmas is being forced into my head no matter where I go and I no longer hear "Oh Holy Night," but just a million subliminal messages saying things like "there's only three days til Christmas and you have four presents left to buy and you are out of money!"

3. The TV specials. Yea, I love that first showing of Year Without A Santa Clause, too. But by the time the week before Christmas rolls around, I'm tired of every single channel showing something holiday related. Frosty's New Year and the Rugrats' Hannakuh and the Very Special Episode of CSI North Pole and every single sitcom insisting on doing a ghost of Christmas past thing, I'm ready to put the Christmas tree through the screen.

4. The crowds. You already know I hate shopping. But sometimes you have to do it. So even if I just want to go buy some groceries, I have to deal with the fact that my grocery store is in the same lot as the local WalMart. Which means fifteen cars all vying for the same parking space, lots of honking horns and people cursing at each other, old people taking twelve minutes to pull into a parking spot that could fit a truck, soccer moms in their Hummers barrelling through the lot as if they were the only people on the planet, fat, lazy fuckers who follow you to your car trying to get the closest parking space possible even though there are 50 empty spaces at the end of the lot.....maybe I just hate parking lots. Or people.

5. The "War on Christmas." Ok, this may or may not exist, but I'll tell you something. I'm not religious by any stretch of the imagination and Jesus is not the reason for my season, but I've got a problem with people who go out of their way to strip these holidays of everything they are supposed to be about. How could it possibly offend you when someone says Merry Christmas to you? I don't care what religion you are or aren't, would it fucking kill you to just smile and say, same to you? Why does it bother you so much to see a menorah or nativity scene in front of a building? How the hell is this affecting your life so much that you need to protest about it? What ever happened to live and let live? Why can't we all get along? Bah.

In the spirit of all that, I give you my nine favorite secular, politically correct Christmas carols:

1. I'm Dreaming of Many-Hued Winter Season
2.Rudolph, the Reindeer with the Facial Appendage of a Different Color
3.Oh, Come all ye Faithful, Agnostics and Atheists
4. Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer (but it was Grandma's fault for being in the space set aside for woodland creatures to run free without interference from human beings)
5. Frosty the Snowperson of An Indistinguishable Gender
6. I Saw My Parent/Step Parent/Guardian/Caretaker Kissing Santa Claus
7. I'm Getting Nothin' for Christmas (because my parents think the holiday is overcommercialized and co-opted from pagans and only capitalist pigs buy presents)
8. You Must Have Had a Terrible Childhood, Mr. Grinch
9. All I Want For Christmas is My Two Front Teeth (but because we don't have nationalized health care for everyone, my parents can't afford dental coverage)

Michele wishes you a Happy Festivus.

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