My Own Guilty Forays into Early Christmas

So perhaps I'll backtrack a little bit and soften the rather judgmental stance I took in my last post about getting Christmas underway too soon. I'll extend some credit to Michael Spencer of internetmonk.com for his recent post: Skip the Carping this Advent. Here's a snippet:

Stay positive this Advent. Even the pagans like the calendars, the music and the candles. Let’s like it all so much that the joy of it overflows into the streets in the middle of the coldest nights. Put away the negativity and include yourself in all those regular folks that God loves enough to come up with this entire Christmas business.

Knowing what Christmas is all about doesn’t add ten points to your score. It just makes it all the more amazing.

But he makes an even better point when he sings the praises of the seasonal nog in True Confessions of an Egg Nog Addict. I read this post, and thought 'That sounds familiar.' I'm a total nog junkie, too, and now that I'm an adult, I may have gotten worse. From the very first time I ever tasted it, I knew this would be my favourite drink in the world.

Denise imagines that egg nog is meant to be “cut” with milk. She is unable to comprehend the ingestion of pure egg nog as a beverage. Like a teetotaler suggesting the bourbon be diluted with lesser substances, she simply doesn’t understand that in the higher levels of addiction, it is blasphemy to dilute sin with any amount of righteousness. Let us have our sin straight. In a tall glass. Oh just give me the bottle.

Amen, brother. I grew up in a family with two younger brothers, and my parents (probably wisely saving the Christmas fund for toys instead of nog) used to insist we mix our egg nog with milk. However, the older we got, the more we realized that it didn't have to be a 50-50 mix. 66-33 would probably do, or even 80-20.

At one point, when I was in high school, I realized that since I had money coming in from delivering papers, there was nothing to stop me from buying my own carton, to drink as I saw fit. So I trudged through the snow, bought a whole litre, and got almost all the way home before I realized the problem. There was no way my parents would let me just drink this egg nog straight. If they found out about it, I'd have to mix it, and I'd probably have to share with my brothers. However, if I just kept it unrefrigerated in my room, it would ruin Christmas awfully quick.

. . . the brighter readers have realized where this is going . . .

So I crouched in a snowbank behind the fence, and drank pretty much the whole carton in somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes. Just thinking of it now makes me a bit sick. As I recall, even though I didn't actually throw up, I regretted it for the rest of the evening. However, the next morning (and any morning thereafter) I'd gladly do it all again!

'Tis the season, Marge! We only get thirty sweet noggy days. Then the government takes it away again.