This hasn't been a great holiday season for me. Thanksgiving started out fine, but one of our guests unknowingly brought a flu bug with her. The Saturday after Thanksgiving, not long after dinner, I suddenly came down with it. About an hour later, my husband did, too.

Ironically, at almost the exact moment I took sick, my best friend from high school passed away. I didn't learn about the latter fact until a few days ago, because while I was still in touch with my friend, it took her family a while to track me down. (That's the down side of having your address book password protected, I guess.) Her family has (wisely, I think) decided to wait until after the holidays to have a memorial service for her, back in Connecticut, but her mother has decided to go full Catholic mass with it, despite the fact that Laurie Anne hasn't practiced Catholicism since she was last forced to sit through mass at St. Bernard High. I very much want to fly back to attend, but it will make my skin crawl to enter a church where I've been explicitly told I'm not welcome because of who I am, especially considering just how much the travel is going to cost me.

The drop to one income has been a big shock to the system, meaning that we simply couldn't afford to do the holiday gift-giving that we wanted to. I don't much care for receiving presents, as I live in a very small space, have recently consolidated two households into one, and am still going through the painful process of giving cherished possessions to Goodwill because I simply don't have room for them. I therefore don't want any more stuff, and I'm therefore grateful that there was very little under the tree this year. But it pained me to feel like I was being a Grinch with respect to the spirit of giving, especially since we're spending exorbitant amounts of money on the house -- more so that we planned because we've discovered that the illegal addition (which exists despite the seller telling us there was no unpermitted work on the house when we bought it) wasn't built right and will have to be largely rebuilt -- and I feel like I really could be spending more of that money on others and less on myself.

In 1843, Ebenezer Scrooge said, "Bah! Humbug!" whenever someone wished him a Merry Christmas. Today's cultural equivalent would be, "Meh! What a rip-off!" (The etymology I found for the slang "humbug" when I played the role was that a humbug was a popular scam/hoax at the time, in which people were asked to pay money to see a bug that hummed, an effect which was pulled off by gluing an insect on a sound box which then hummed when the insect attempted to fly away. Officially the origin of the term is unknown, though.) It's easy to look at the obligatory expenses that come up around the holiday season that way when things aren't going well. It's also easy to look at your tax bill and feel like the charitable contributions can be let go because, after all, we're paying lots of money into a welfare system which can take care of the poor. ("Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?" That was the 19th-century equivalent of our modern welfare system.) And so, like the character I played so many years ago, my charitable contributions dropped to practically nil this year, a fact which I'm very much not happy about.

But rather than writing a tirade about how miserable Christmas is, I instead want to wish everyone much joy and prosperity.

You see, to me the point of celebrating Christmas -- whether you're Christian or not -- is to take time to remember that even though life deals you ups and downs, there is joy and community all around you if you keep the right frame of mind. So, like Scrooge's addled nephew, I'm determined to be merry at Christmas, regardless of how poor I am, or how surly those around me are, or whatever else is going wrong in my life.

So, from one curmudgeon to all of you I say, Happy Christmas to all, and to all, a good life!

Jesus is the reason for the season, where "Jesus" is defined as "an ancient, pagan celebration of the return of the sun following the winter solstice."

Instead of calling it the Christmas Season, perhaps we should instead call it the Indoor Pine Allergy Season.

Living someplace does not automatically make you an expert about it.

Don't skip breakfast.

The differences between amateurs and professionals isn't best measured in the end results they get, it's in the time, difficulty, and expense required to get there.

It's not polite to share your viruses with others.

The internet never slows to a crawl when you shouldn't be using it.

With regards to getting your projects completed, don't rely on the kindness of your employees' other employers.

A hint of the scent of fresh-baked pizza doesn't make a fart smell any better.

It doesn't do you any good to buy a new toothbrush every six months if you keep forgetting to trade out your old one for it.

Neurosis can be contagious.

Human nature doesn't change, but every society redefines the rules of how that nature is expressed.

Never be surprised when a government breaks what it's trying to fix.

Happy Birthday, sophiaserpentia!

Perhaps the most important kitchen skill to develop -- after how not to burn down the house, of course -- is the ability to figure out what to make with what's about to go bad.