My Top 8 Reasons Why Clark Griswold is the Quintessential Doofus Dad

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As is tradition — mine and everyone else’s — I recently watched “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” again for the 1,824th time. Watching a movie or TV show repeatedly like that has its pros and cons. The main con is that you…

Kid’s Electronics Christmas Contract

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(Updated from 12-2012) Since first publishing this Kid's Electronics Christmas Contract in 2012, I've been delighted but not necessarily surprised at how many nervous parents have downloaded it. We're all in this child-rearing boat together,…

Why Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer May Be the Most Bizarre Movie Ever Made

Author's note: There must be something in the air, because within a day of originally posting this last week, I started noticing similar, much more serious stories appearing across the Internet. People are genuinely outraged about "Rudolph,"…

My Top 10 Christmas Traditions, including Rudolph’s PJ Delivery

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Christmas is my favorite time of year for a variety of reasons. I love the music, the TV shows and movies, the general feeling of good will, and all that other gooey stuff. However, it may be the family traditions surrounding Christmas that make it so ... Christmasy. If you look at them from an objective perspective, most traditions are meaningless. But the meaning WE attach to them is all that really matters, right? It's fun to do the same thing year after year as if the order of the cosmos somehow depends on it.

And so that was Christmas…

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It's January 2 and Christmas is officially over. Sigh. It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't such an unceremonious ending. You've got four or five weeks of slowly climbing that first big hill of the rollercoaster — tick, tick, tick…

The Top 8 Reasons why Christmas in the ’70s was Awesome

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It's no surprise that people tend to view the decade of their childhood as the best. As kids, we look at the world with innocence and wonder through formative eyes that are focused mostly on the good things in the world rather than the…

The Top 15 Indispensable Christmas Songs

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  (Originally post 12/4/12.  Updated.) Due to the brisk response I received to my “Top 10 Christmas Shows” post, I decided to tackle a song list. As a music guy and a Christmas freak, it was impossible for me to narrow…

The Top 10 Christmas Shows, period, the end.

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If you're like me, you don't need any help deciding which Christmas shows to watch.  You know what you like and what you don't. So why would you come here to read my "Top 10 Christmas Shows, period, the end"?  Easy.  So you can either…