John Holton is our host for Writer’s Workshop. Here are the prompts for 12/16/25:

  1. Write a post inspired by the word service.
  2. Write a post in exactly fifteen (15) sentences.
  3. Would you rather travel to the past or travel to the future? How far into the past/future would you want to go?
  4. What music and/or podcasts have you been listening to?
  5. Open up a dictionary to a random page and point to a word. Write a paragraph with that word as the main theme.
  6. List 10 things you would do if you didn’t have to work.

“You ready for Christmas?”

This is always said in the perkiest of perky voices, often at a pitch I attribute to sweet princesses in Disney movies.

Ironically, while my actual ears are hearing that high pitched areyoureadyforChristmas???? my inside ears are hearing the hearty BWAHAHAAAA of a villainous laugh. For dramatic effect I imagine lightning cracking across the sky in the background as the temperature drops ten degrees.

And it’s in this moment right here that I repeatedly make the same dreadful mistake…Over and over again, I actually answer this question.

I’ve told a thousand lies or more under this sun, so why is it I keep thinking “are you ready for Christmas?” is a question I need to answer truthfully? Lying would be such a simple solution: “Sure am, how ’bout you?” Or “Absolutely, little Suzie is in the nativity scene this year, so exciting!” For those morally opposed to lying in general or to lying in the Christmas season then perhaps a gentle sidestep would do: “It’s coming up fast, isn’t it?”

That would be a sane, semi- reasonable, mostly normal thing to do.

What do I do? Well, I tend to word vomit all over the unfortunate soul who lobs this question at me.

“Am I ready for CHRISTMAS? Let’s see, I still have a couple of gifts to buy and have yet to plan food for this weekend’s gathering and I just got an alert that one of my packages en route is missing but apparently missing isn’t missing enough for anyone to actually fix the problem so now I’m just waiting to see how that blows up in my life but at least my tree is still standing, if only I could get my ass in gear enough to do some Christmas baking, oh well, ’tis the season, AM I RIGHT?!”

badge by Patty