It’s getting late and the pressure on me is not only mounting, it’s unrelenting as well.

It’s tough enough trying to survive in this economy without the piling on effect of the Christmas Season. Heck I just realized that it’s already the second day of Christmas and I’m already three days behind.

I don’t understand how it happened, which, the rest of my life taken into consideration, should not have been a surprise in the least. But it did come as a surprise anyway. It’s not as though I wasn’t paying attention. I was paying attention, but probably to all of the wrong things, which for me is normal.

I drive around in my car all day, listening to the radio, which gets redundant because all of the stations play pretty much the same music on a rotating basis. So as a result I’ve been trying to find a way to mix up the mobile entertainment by scrolling down the dial. As I was doing it I recently tripped across a station playing absolutely nothing but Christmas music.

Did I mention that I hate Christmas music?

I didn’t always feel that way, but life was different in those days. The songs were songs of promise in my youth. It seems that today they re songs with teeth. But I can only handle so much Rush and seventies music, so I listen to the toothy Christmas stuff.

I really do enjoy some of it, but it struck me that a lot of this music is pretty damned sad for a lot of people whose circumstances have changed since the promising days of yore,

Well all of it was busily sucking my heart and soul into some dreary black hole in space, so I turned the radio off and listened to my tires whine instead of me.

I started thinking of all of the people, some wonderful and some not so wonderful, who have drifted in and out of my life over the years, It didn’t help a whole lot, even though most of the people who came to mind were more of the wonderful sort than not.

I had Stalag 9 to myself on the weekend and was doing my best to stay far away from that black hole in the soul stuff, when my phone rang. Despite my intention to ignore the ringing I answered the phone, and I smiled when I heard the voice of Long Tall Sally on the other end.

Long Tall Sally is all about Christmas.

She’s all about smiling and Christmas music, loving life and all of the other good stuff in this world.

So I smiled when I heard her voice. And then I felt a little sad, because I hadn’t heard from her in a very long time, and I knew it will probably be another very long time before I hear from her again.

I love Long Tall Sally because she loves everything good in this world, and she adds far more than her share of it to the mix.

But most of all I love Long Tall Sally because she might be the only person I have ever known who could annihilate the black hole in the soul and still be left over with some change.

Long Tall Sally makes me laugh. She even got me to put up a Christmas Tree once, when I didn’t really believe in Christmas anymore, so she kind of frightens me too.

I recall when that happened. I didn’t have a stupid tree, but I was told that I needed to have one because “It’s Christmas!!!!”  Who was I to even consider arguing with that kind of flawless logic, especially coming from a girl who is bigger than me. So, fearing for my life I bought a tree on sale at the checkout area of one of the Drug Stores in town.

It was called a Candy Cane Tree, which sounded kind of Christmas like to me at the time, and it was only about 5 bucks, so I figured I might as well get it and save some money as well as my life, possibly.

I got it home and put it together and the damned thing looked Pink! A chick tree!! It was pathetic and sick and ugly. It definitely needed a home for the holidays though, so I kept it, even though the only ornament I owned looked even more pathetic than my chick tree. Then I sucked it up and went to one of the craft stores in search of some more ornamentation for the sickly sucker in Stalag 9. As I wandered around the store in search of some manly kind of stuff to hang on it so it didn’t look so stupid, I found some M&M Elvis ornaments. They were so tacky looking that I couldn’t resist the urge to buy them.

Yep! Long Tall Sally, Tamer of The Grinch was going to get hers when she heard about it. She might be able to terrorize a shorter guy, but I wasn’t going to be scared of her, dammit, even if I did have a friggin’ pink Christmas Tree in my living room!
And then, probably thinking of Long Tall Sally, I decided the stupid thing needed an angel on the top of it!

(To be continued later this week, under threat of penalty of death.)