Since Scottish Parliament banned gingerbread men and Baby It's Cold Outside is now Persona Non Grata, these songs will be next on the chopping block. 

1. I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus: Subjecting minors to softcore porn. Heteronormative. Underage incestuous voyerism.

2. The Christmas Song: Open fire? Pollution. Folks dressed up like Eskimos? Cultural appropriation.

3. Holly Jolly Christmas: Kiss her once for me? Unwanted advances.

4. I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas: Animal abuse.

5. Santa Claus is Coming to Town: Sees you when you’re sleeping? Knows when you’re awake? Peeping Tom/Stalker.

6. Most Wonderful Time of the Year: Everyone telling you be of good cheer? Forced to hide depression.

7. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: Bullying.

8. It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas: Forced gender-specific gifts: dolls for Janice and Jen and boots and pistols (GUNS!) for Barney and Ben.

9. Santa Baby: Gold digger, blackmail.

10. Frosty the Snowman: Sexist; not a snow woman, assumes the gender of Frosty. Religious anarchist; knows he's going to die and ignores the police. Confident he'll be resurrected.

11. Do You Hear What I Hear: Blatant disregard for the Hearing Impaired

12. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas: Make the yuletide GAY? Wow, just wow.

13. Jingle Bell Rock: Giddy up jingle horse, pick up your feet: Animal abuse.

14. Mistletoe and Holly: Overeating, folks stealing a kiss or two? How did this song ever see the light of day?

15. Winter Wonderland: Parson Brown demanding they get married…forced partnership.

16. I’ll Be Home For Christmas: Not if you are homeless. That’s just Insensitive.

17. Grandma got ran over by a reindeer: Homicide. Extremely violent and promotes alcoholism.

18. All I Want for Christmas Is You: Insensitive to people suffering from Obsessive Compulsive behavior.

19. Deck the Halls; Don we now our GAY apparel. HOLY SHIT!

20. Dominick the Donkey; Ethnic sterotyping, reinforcing gender stereotypes, animal abuse. It's a trifecta!

21. Fairytale of New York; Drops F-Bomb (the gay one; and it’s NOT “fairy”); Promotes ethnic stereotypes. Slut shaming.

22. Do They Know It's Christmas?; White supremacist. Paternalistic. What? Africans can't save themselves? 

Gleefully stolen from various sites on the interwebz and compiled here.

The kitties were nestled, all snug in their beds, while the humans read books and scratched their furry heads. 

I hope your day was peaceful and bright. 

I am very lucky to have you all in my world. 

I love this platform. 

Feeling warm and grateful and happy today. 

Had breakfast with the Casarinos this morning and did the immediate-family gift exchange, and came back home for a shower and disco-nap. Gonna kidnap Lee and head back over to Casarino-land for dinner and goofiness. 

Whether you're celebrating Christmas or not, I hope it's a happy, snuggly day. 

Thankfully, Mrs. Ferret was talking about making a pan o' cocoa, and NOT a panic cocoa.  Aie!  Recipe available upon request.

May your day be merry and bright!

EDITED TO ADD: FTS. I’m opening the wine. I didn’t hit the button on the timer hard enough, the outside of the gingerbread was burnt, the inside of the gingerbread was cooked properly but tasted like Allspice Barf. If I can’t pay attention well enough to follow a recipe and properly use a kitchen timer, then it’s time to stop working and decide that this is it. 

—————

I made two batches of gingerbread (which I have not made since I was so little that I needed to stand on my grandmother’s step stool to reach the mixer). 
Batch #1 is intended to make shaped or cut cookies (persons of gingerbread origin). 
Batch #2 is intended to be bars, baked in a baking dish. 

Batch # 1 called for 3.5 cups of flour. The dough was extremely thick, almost like bread dough. It’s chilling in the fridge. 
Batch # 2 called for 1.75 cups of flour. It also called for 1/2 cup of boiling water. Prior to adding the water, it had a cookie dough or cake dough like consistency. After adding the water, it became more like a soup. 

The bag of flour was a 32 ounce bag. This tells me that once I added the 3.5 cups of flour in Batch # 1, there should have been only 4 ounces of flour left in the bag.  However, there was an entire 8 ounces left over after adding all ingredients for both recipes. 

Yet I remember adding at least .75 cups of flour to Batch #2, because I remember looking at the 3/4 marker on the side of the cup. It is possible that I forgot to fill the measuring cup twice instead of once.  

I added a tiny bit more flour to Batch # 2, and it’s baking in the oven now. 

Here’s what I don’t understand:
-Did I screw up one recipe, or both? 
-Is there some magical property to King Arthur All Purpose Unbleached flour that causes a 32 ounce bag to yield 5 and a half cups (44 ounces)? 
-Is this a Hannukah miracle? 
-should I have added the cup of flour to Batch # 2? 
-What is gingerbread dough really supposed to look like before baking? Should there be a big difference between the baking sheet vs. baking pan varieties? 
-should I get a camera installed in my kitchen if I’m going to continue baking? 
-why do the holidays have to be a nonstop parade of dishwashing? 
-what time is wine o’clock?

Well now that I'm inviting others to OPW by the handful I guess I better buckle down and write more often than once every couple years...

Please accept my non-denominational holiday wishes with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2019, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere. Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith, lack thereof or sexual preference of the wishee or wisher.

Oh, yeah, One Post Wonder still exists.

I've been writing more or less consistently since the end of August, which still kind of surprises me.  After an initial spurt where I tried using 4thewords.com to gamify it, I gave up on that but still kept writing.  Daily writing has slid back to bidaily writing to occasionally every three days, but it hasn't stopped yet.  And, most impressively, this is a second draft, revision of a novel I wrote in two NaNoWriMos in the previous decade.

It did kind of divide up nicely into two pieces, but they're both too close to 50,000 words to be complete novels, so I'm trying to do it as a single novel for now.  I am adding some words, mostly because when I wrote the second half I gave a secondary character her own viewpoint chapters, and I'm trying to add them back in to the first half.  Maybe strict alternation is not going to work completely, since Janine may not have as much happening with her as Philip does, but I'm trying it anyway.  I'm still not quite up to the end of the first part, since I am being very forgiving with my quota.  Especially when I'm writing new words and not just tweaking old scenes, I'm settling for less than 500 words at a sitting, and generally that's less than half an hour.  But it is NOT ZERO and I am NOT STOPPING YET.

This comes after a few long stretches of not feeling like any of my games, so perhaps it hasn't been as drastic a change as that.  If I'd gone from four hours of Skyrim or Sims 2 every night to wedging in writing, it might have been too much.  I do sometimes think wistfully of playing more games, but I think it's really more reasonable in any case.  Though I have close to six columns of computer game icons on my desktop, and more that aren't even on there (ones that my kids bought on Steam and I never installed, or that I bought on GOG.com and never installed).

I haven't quite settled on a title for the book yet--when I wrote it, the two parts were "Bleen" and "Grue", and the overall title was "Many Worlds".  But I find myself calling it "Bleen & Grue" more often than I do "Many Worlds", so who knows.  If this thing should ever end up getting published by someone other than me, then they'll get the final decision on the title anyway, so no point in my stressing over it.

At the rate I'm going, it may take a full year to get through the revision, though I keep hoping that the second half will end up requiring less revision.  A lot of what I've done so far has just been taking the random flailing from early in the book, before I found the plot and settled on the way the world works, and making it more consistent, adding the viewpoints I mentioned above, and bringing in a few more characters to flesh out the characters' somewhat sparse personal lives.  Oh, and keeping Janine and Philip's relationship from being too firmly settled from the beginning.  
The initial idea I'd had for it was just to have somebody flipping randomly between parallel worlds, and I threw in a whimsical alien at the beginning just to be interesting.  Zombies turned up later because I was reading Max Brooks's Zombie Survival Guide at the time.  As has happened before, my vague wanderings acquired a plot eventually, and so I've had to try to bring the vague wanderings into line with the plot.  In particular, when the main character, Philip, was being randomly swapped into another world by an alternate self, I had to figure out why this was happening.  I've almost considered writing up an outline, but I haven't managed to follow through on it.  I wrote my first draft in vim (as I'm writing this right now), but I've been trying to use Scrivener for my second draft.  I'm sure I'm not using most of the features, but it has been nice a few times to be able to drag-and-drop scenes from one place to another.

What keeps tapping at my brain is an idea for a big huge fantasy series type thing, based on the Lorenai pbem game I played back in the late 90's.  When the game came to an end, the game data was all made available, and I've whiled away many hours poring over it since then.  Looking at it recently has made me want to convert it into something more novelish, and I swear I've probably come up with about half a dozen novels by now.  It'll be interesting to turn it from a somewhat dry email game based heavily on Middle Earth (my faction operated out of Minas Tirith, for instance) into something with a life of its own, but I've got plenty of ideas.  In my own fashion, I'm planning to just take place and character names, run them through rot13 and then massage them into something pronounceable.  For instance, "Minas Tirith" would become "Zvanf Gvevgu", which has morphed into "Zon Vivica".  I'm resisting trying to make up an entire conlang for the series along with everything else.  Anyway, I've promised myself that I'll try to at least start on this next after I finish "Many Worlds".  I may even outline this time, just to see if I can make it work.

I should dig out a few short stories sometime, too, and see if I can work those into something publishable.  A lot of the ones I've posted online already, I'm not sure if I could interest an editor in, but I do have a handful that I never did...

A mammoth of an eerily silent great horned owl swooped down in front of us while driving down a small winding road towards my house the other night. It was a ghost of a creature floating in front of us for a few seconds, giant and mysterious, until it angled up effortlessly to the top of a nearby pine tree.

I could not tell you for the life of me what either of us had been nattering on about when we saw it, but it stopped our noise in its tracks. Even now, thinking about it, I can see its eye as it turned its head slightly, just to catch us by the corner, before it looked away again.  I can feel the dead quiet awe that came over me, bringing a veil of calm.

Today in history, the Forty-Seven Rōnin, under the command of Ōishi Kuranosuke, avenged the death of their daimyō, Asano Naganori. Asano had been compelled to perform seppuku for assaulting a court official named Kira Yoshinaka.

After they lost their positions as samurai, the forty-seven made themselves appear to have lost all honor by posing as drunkards and thieves. After waiting and planning for a year, the rōnin avenged their master's honor by killing Kira. In turn, they were themselves obliged to commit seppuku for committing the crime of murder. 

Their story has been fictionalized several times, but always at the expense of the actual story.