Strained Verbosity

 Some of you may soon be receiving holiday cards. Some of them may be Christmas cards. Others could be less pointed, gesturing in the direction of the whole back end of the calendar year. If you are reading this, there is a distinct possibility that one of those pieces of mail in your box at the end of December will be from me. And my wife. 

You may notice a distinct lack of specific sentiment written by yours truly at or near the lower right hand on the inside as you open our card. Just my name or a few words then my name but nothing in the realm of specific greetings for a holly jolly Christmas or Happy Holidays or a Cavalcade of a Kwanza. To that end, I am specifically apologetic, but here's something you may not have considered: 

It's December. I'm nearly out of words. The ones you are currently reading have actually been set aside months in advance in hopes of being able to make it all the way to the thirty-first. Happily, of course, there is a certain amount of recycling that goes on in my head as the nights get longer and the days get shorter. See there? I just cobbled together a sentiment about the winter solstice that echoes many of those that have come from years past. Plus, many of the diatribes I may spout about the incoming Trumpreich carry with them the stink of those left over from 2016. Only now they're four years older and perhaps none the wiser. 

Just stinky. 

Plus there's that element of drawing the actual card. Starting back in the days before Thanksgiving, I was busy scrawling on my sketchpad, trying to come up with something pithy to share for the nearly fifty years of coming up with something pithy to share. You know that whole bit about a picture being a thousand words, so let's just say I'm already several thousand words into the holiday season and having thought about it that much has made my brain hurt. 

Not a lot, thank you for your concern, but enough that staring at a pile of envelopes with the thought of having to be clever one more time makes me so very tired. Trying to find a way to sugarcoat 2024 is next to impossible anyway, so you'll have to take my collective words here for it.

I hope you're merry. I hope there's some jolly in it for you too. I suppose that I hope that the joy that can be found during this time isn't wasted by wiseapples like me. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to figure out how to rhyme something with "convicted felon."

Rotten melon?