Tree Haulin' - Nov. 26, 2021 - Johnny Boy Marketing

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Family Rituals 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦
The Grinch Rocks ❤️
Churros and Poke Bowls 🤤

It’s interesting to think about how family rituals actually become family rituals. There are some that are very intentional. You had something done for you as a child, so you do the same thing for your kid.

Others just sort of happen.

One of ours is the annual hauling-in-the-Christmas-tree photo. I’m pretty sure this started before we had kids, and it most definitely wasn’t planned. I never had a real Christmas tree. They were Too Dangerous and Made A Mess. I don’t recall knowing anyone who had a real Christmas tree, either. When the holidays came, we dragged out the box, unfolded the limbs, stuck the ends in a metal pole and voila! Christmas was here.

Wifey Poo grew up in a family that cut their own tree from the property on which we now live. We had a fake Christmas tree on our first Christmas together, as our apartment had rules against live ones. Again, Too Dangerous.

But when we moved to our first house? Wifey Poo was all about the live tree. So we went to a tree lot, picked out one that was the perfect size for our newly expanded living quarters, and she took a photo of me as I carried it into the house on my shoulder.

Every year, the same thing would happen — whether our home was in Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota or Missouri. When we had kids, they started popping up in the photos, often holding the door open and looking excited as Dad brought in the thing under which Santa would put the presents.

This year, we hit up Charlie’s to try to find a Christmas tree. It’s a local hardware/home store that has somehow survived despite being in the shadow of Lowe’s and Home Depot. FIL went there religiously.

I’m all for “buy local.” I’m not all for “pay $80 for a Christmas tree.” So after a brief look around their lot and an awkward, “No, we’re good” response to the friendly attendant’s question of “Did you find what you’re looking for?” we motored the mile to HD and found our tree for a much more reasonable price of $32.

Twenty minutes later, there I was, tree over my shoulder, carrying the first of what I hope are many Christmas trees into our humble country home. Boy The Elder held open the door (as Boy The Younger disappeared for what he termed “a good poop.”) and then they both tightened the screws on the tree stand to secure it. Ten minutes of “a little to the left… no, a little to the right” and we had a straight, ready-to-decorate Christmas tree.

We’ve never compiled all these lugging-the-Christmas-tree photos into one place. They’re stored in various spots on various discs and cloud services. I’m thinking I need to find them and do some sort of montage … and maybe a tribute to the gradual loss of my hair.

The tree hauling was the culmination of a day of Christmas cheer. The boys broke out the outside Christmas decorations while I was getting ready for the day, and together we brought some illumination to the countryside. BTY jumped at the opportunity to get on the roof. I think he’d live up there, if given the chance. BTE had a plan of attack before I even got out there. He directed his brother on putting hooks into the right spots to fasten the colored outdoor bulbs along the overhang of our porch.

My job was to put The Grinch down at the end of the driveway and run some lights in the nearby trees. My purchase of The Grinch last decade was a masterful idea to deal with a neighborhood that was uber competitive when it came to outside Christmas decorations. I’d see these guys spend an entire Saturday creating elaborate, precise displays of festive glory, channeling their inner Clark Griswold in the hopes of earning the Baby Jesus’s favor.

I wasn’t about all that.

I’m not what you can call a precise person. The thought of stringing out Christmas lights so each bulb is the exact distance duo makes me twitchy. So I bought this Grinch cutout in which it looks like he’s stealing the lights from your house. Then I ran a string of lights haphazardly from the roof to The Grinch. One extension cord and one spotlight later… BOOM! I was done and back inside drinking a cup of coffee.

And damned if my 20 minutes of work didn’t get more attention and positive comments than their eight hours of toil.

Efficiency, baby. It’s the name of the game.

Side Note on The Grinch: It appears to me that the pre-woke Grinch was an asshole merely because people were jerks to him. And I’m sure it didn’t help that he had some old guy singing songs about what a shithead he was every two minutes.

📚 Let’s Learn Something Together 📓🖊️

Did you know there’s a place in St. Louis in which you can sample ethnic cuisine in what once was a factory that had a role in the history of electrical manufacturing? It’s true. We went there today.

Wifey Poo found The City Foundry STL while searching for good restaurants to try. The building is the former Century Electric Foundry complex, which was one of the Big Three electrical motor manufacturers in St. Louis back in the day when commercial electricity was first becoming a thing — at the time that rat-bastard Thomas Edison was stealing Nikola Tesla’s glory.

Today it houses walk-up restaurants with dishes from all around the globe — including Argentina, Senegal, Hawaii and India — along with more Amurican stuff like chicken and waffles, subs, cheesecakes and rotisserie meats. Wifey Poo and I had poke bowls. BTE mowed through spicy chicken and waffles. BTY had what looked like a great chicken sub. Then the boys downed a churro before we headed for home.

It’s definitely a place to which I want to return.

The ‘What Did You Say?’ of the Day

‘Right now, you’re talking about sort of like a red flag that this might be an issue.’
Dr. Anthony Fauci, on the emergence of the new omnicron variant of Covid

Back in the Before Times, I started whiling away some hours playing a game on the iPad called Plague. It was this fun little game in which you created a virus, planted it in a starter country and then watched it spread as you tinkered with it to evolve it and achieve the game’s goal: Wipe out all of humanity.

Yeah. About that.

One of the ways to be successful at the game was to start your virus in a populous country with a variety of forms of international travel and a poor information-sharing network. Like, say, China.

The key then was to evolve your virus slowly so it infected a crapton of people before it caught the attention of the scientific community. Don’t make it spread too fast and certainly don’t make it ebola-deadly. Otherwise, researchers would develop a vaccine before your virus could kill everyone.

Once it had spread to various points across the globe, the right move was to start mutating it, turning it into increasingly more deadly and contagious forms. From there, you could basically just sit back and watch as billions of people died, governments fell, chaos reigned and the human population disappeared.

Typically, the last strongholds of humanity would be found on Iceland or Greenland. So if you need me, I’ll be be packing today in preparation for my move here …

Your second side note of the day: Omnicron sounds like something that would appear in The Transformers. If it happens to wipe out humanity, props to Megatron for his work. God, I loved the OG cartoon back in the day. I was seriously invested in the struggle between Autobots and Decepticons.

High Five ✋

Today’s official endorsement goes to Amazon. I know, I know. They’re horrible. They treat their workers like crap (see “In Other Writing,” below), they collect massive amounts of data on you, they put small businesses out of work, and Jeff Bezos has child sex slaves in his basement.

They also sold me a snow blower, green lightbulbs and various gifts for Wifey Poo today to keep me from having to set foot in a store among the crazy masses seeking Black Friday deals.

Ya take the good, ya take the bad, ya take them both and there ya have …

In Other Writing …

What it’s Really Like to Work in an Amazon Warehouse

Let me state this straight-away: I never peed in a bottle while I was working in an Amazon warehouse. That said, It doesn’t surprise me that some employees evidently have. Some background: I worked in an Amazon warehouse for about three months during the oh-so-fun year that was 2020. I was a marketing/communications guy in…