My daughter keeps asking me for a Christmas list, so I’ll write one here, which she can reference if she cares to.

 

1. I wish companies mistakenly delivered big cans of popcorn to my office year round.
2. Popcorn is nature’s perfect food.
3. Especially when it has caramel drizzled all over it.
4. But I can do without the kind with the “cheese” coating.
5. That stuff would give an automaton the runs.
6. If movie theaters didn’t have popcorn to mark up 1000%, they would go out of business.
7. We don’t thank popcorn enough for its service to the film industry.
8. The best kettle-cooked corn I ever had was made on the spot in Hannibal, Missouri.
9. Little known fact: Tom Sawyer was a kettle corn fiend.
10. Becky Thatcher had her corn issues, too.
11. 
    I wish I hadn’t raised my children to believe it’s not Christmas without a live tree.
12. Live trees have become a pain in the butt.
13. I’m still finding needles from last year’s tree.
14. I wish my grandparents had kept their aluminum tree with the color wheel.
15. I sometimes wish I were Jewish this time of year.
16. I would love to eat at a Chinese restaurant on Christmas day.
17. Or just about any day.
18. I wish we had gotten smaller stockings for our girls.
19. You could drop a Crown Vic in those things and still not fill them.
20. Maybe I’ll put a roll of toilet paper in each one.
21. My mom used to pad our stockings with oranges.
22. The kind with seeds.
23. I wish the produce place I go to sold those little clementine oranges year round.
24. Those things are like orange candy that’s good for you.
25. And they don’t have seeds.
26. I wish Nat King Cole were here to sing The Christmas Song live.
27. I wish I knew what Bing Crosby was thinking as he sang the Little Drummer Boy with David Bowie.
28. I wish How the Grinch Stole Christmas ended before it got all mushy.
29. I wish people would quit using gift as a verb.
30. Seriously now, give was doing just fine before gift started getting greedy.
31. “Tis better to gift than to receive?”
32. I don’t think so.

There you go, Sophia. Have at it.

P.S. I wouldn’t mind either if anyone checked out my books here. That would make for a decent Christmas wish.