Everyone knows that you do it, Frank – you can’t snore like a goddamn buzzsaw during communion and not expect anyone to notice. Show a little respect!

Of course, Easter is a big time for Christians because second only to getting Christmas presents and being born and whatnot, we know with great certainty that Jesus loved hunting for Easter eggs. For it’s been said that nothing put a smile on that kid’s face quite like hopping out of bed on Easter morning and scurrying down the hall to find that the Easter Bunny had paid a visit to God’s kingdom, hiding brightly colored eggs filled with chocolates and a giant Easter basket overflowing with goodies for young Jesus to find…

Being an only child because his half brothers spent holidays with their mom, God tended to spoil Jesus something fierce because he was the kind of parent to love his boy through things instead of emotions. And that was perfectly fine with Jesus because it scored him all sorts of sweet presents like PlayStation games and Pokémon cards, and one year when he did particularly well on his report card, his father even let him get a bunny for Easter … though he quickly regretted it and turned the bunny into chocolate upon realizing just how much real bunnies poop all over the place!

Granted, it wasn’t all rainbows and jellybeans for Jesus growing up.

One not so good Friday, Jesus had a bit of a run in with some of the townsfolk and they roughed him up pretty bad, as angry mobs are wont to do. They forced him to wear this pointy hat and dragged him through the mud, and it really sucked the life out of poor Jesus … but as we all know, Jesus was never one to take a challenge laying down and only a few days later he was up and running again, some would even say filled with more life than ever.

Other years little Jesus faced similar hardships, like the one where his mother insisted on him wearing an Easter bonnet “just for a few photos” and then made him keep it on even longer because her sister was coming over and she thought it would be cute, despite looking absolutely ridiculous to anyone capable of free thought.

Still, he always looked forward to Easter dinner and had quite the fondness for lamb and roast ham, which kind of makes sense seeing that he was born in a barn and all. Jesus was sure to steer clear of the deviled eggs, though, as well as that weird green jelly thing with the fruit floating in it that everyone’s aunt always makes and then harasses everybody about never eating…

Yes, Easter was a magical time for young Jesus, filled with chocolate eggs and marshmallow peeps, and unnaturally pastel rabbits and Reese’s Pieces cleverly arranged in the shape of carrots, and if he was really lucky, some years Easter would fall in line on the calendar with spring break so he would get an extra long vacation from school culminating with presents and chocolate galore – can’t argue with that!

So this weekend while you’re hunting for those brightly colored eggs and dining on that glorious roast pig, take a moment to think of the little boy Jesus and the brief moment in time where he had a pet rabbit.

The good word is that he named him Sir Poops-a-Lot and fed him a diet of cream soda and jelly beans, but that – my sleepy churchgoers – is a tale for another day…

The post A Brief History of Jesus and the Easter Bunny appeared first on Just Laugh.

Others are still incapacitated from yesterday’s self-imposed turkey and gravy coma.

Let them enjoy their savings and their sweet dreams of mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie, though, because we’ve got our own objective this weekend while the house is quiet and the air is calm before the impending holiday storm creeps in … because Christmas decorations don’t put themselves up, my fine multi-color illuminated friends, and nobody wants to be that guy who’s still frantically trying to decorate his home on Christmas Eve in hopes that Santa won’t skip them over for more impressively decorated abodes…

I know because I’ve been that guy and it’s never a pretty sight to find yourself scrambling through the desolate remains in the holiday lighting section of your local superstore, with your only choices at that point being a ratty, already opened box of icicle lights and a full shelf of those ridiculous inflatable outhouses because even rednecks need their Christmas decorations, too!

We have a rule in our house – and by we, I mean that my wife has a rule in our house – that holiday decorations aren’t to go up, or nary even be spoken of, until after Thanksgiving, which means that already we’re behind schedule compared to all of the stores that’ve been casually sneaking red and green housewares and pre-decorated Christmas trees onto their shelves since roughly August. Back when I lived in the frozen wasteland of Northern Michigan, I would actually start putting lights up in September, though admittedly most of that ambition was merely to avoid trudging around in subzero temperatures and going up on the roof once it had been transformed into a veritable slip and slide of snow and ice…

Thankfully now that I live in sunny Florida, I can wear shorts and flip-flops the day after Thanksgiving and I’m still to beach standards considered overdressed for the occasion!

So now is the time for us to channel our inner-Griswold as we dig those overflowing boxes of holiday delight out of crawlspaces and garages throughout suburbia, donning our sunglasses and cranking up the Christmas music to a moderately reasonable volume as we strive to illuminate our homes to the point where passing planes might mistakenly think that we’re part of the airport and thus ensure that the boys down at the electric company will most certainly still receive their Christmas bonuses this year.

I may not be a fan of heights, but I’ll take the risk of falling off the roof vs falling prices any day.

And though I love me some pumpkin pie, give me twinkling lights over pumpkin spice even with an extra dollop of whipped cream.

‘Tis the season for dancing lights a’plenty up and down every lane, street, and boulevard – so many that the neighbors have to buy special blinds if they want to get any sleep at all during the month of December while your house shines like a beacon for all that is jolly and bright, for a man’s decorating job isn’t truly done until his house puts out more light than our sun high in the noonday sky.

…but far more colorful and festive, of course!

So gather your extension cords and your tallest of ladders, my band of manic merrymakers, for we’ve got eaves to illuminate and halls to deck, golden stars to hang and mistletoe to also hang … wink wink … because our time is now and this season just wouldn’t be the most magical time of the year without our incredible efforts filling the streets where we live and play with tens of thousands of dazzling lights and smiling snowmen and towering inflatables as far as the eye can see.

Ain’t no way that we’re missing out on any visits from Santa due to low visibility – that’s for sure!

The post Operation: Decorate! appeared first on Just Laugh.

Seriously – the guy from The Apprentice. “You’re fired?”

I guess it was a little catchier back when he was just sitting on a gold-encrusted throne in the boardroom of Trump Tower instead of the Oval Office where he’s likely to face challenges a little bigger than trying to make Bret Michaels and Omarosa get along, but hey, I’m sure everything will work out just fine, right?!

Needless to say, with the country literally divided in half for pretty much the most significant election of our lifetime, that Thanksgiving dinner this year where we gather the family red and blue alike around the table in celebration of gratitude or some nonsense is likely to be just a wee bit intense in homes where the entire lot of them weren’t all collectively aboard the Trump Train…

…with the railroad industry being one of the few that Donald Trump hasn’t declared bankruptcy in yet…

This humble list of suggestions I present to you in an attempt to make peace at dinner tables across America – at least until the family unbuckles their pants and falls asleep from overindulgence on turkey and stuffing and pumpkin pie like our Founding Fathers intended.

• Respect the political differences you have with your relatives by never looking them directly in the eye and muttering expletives under your breath when they’re just out of earshot.
• Subtly work in the hashtag #TurkeyLivesMatter when you’re saying the family blessing.
• Prepare a list of pre-approved discussion topics for the dinner table that everyone can enjoy, including subjects like “Wasn’t the turkey more moist last year?” and “Please tell me you bought more than one box of wine…”
• Try not to bring up the fact that if the Indians had only built a 50-foot wall of solid concrete along the eastern seaboard, maybe none of this would’ve ever happened.
• Refrain from calling your Aunt Meredith a xenophobic fascist – at least until after she passes the sweet potato casserole.
• If you need to take a moment during your delicious Thanksgiving meal, feel free to weep silently into the cranberry sauce … nobody’s going to eat that stuff anyways.
• Ixnay on the opular vote-pay.
• Don’t throw food at your siblings for supporting Trump; throw food at them for chasing you around the backyard with the garden hose when you were seven.
• Celebrate the commonalities associated with Thanksgiving that we can all appreciate – things like overeating and pumpkin pie and sitting on our butts while somebody else does the dishes!
• And if nothing else, never underestimate the power of stuffing your ears full of mashed potatoes and chanting, “La la la – maybe the electors will still pick Hillary anyways…” over and over again until it’s time to go Black Friday shopping.

The post Tips for Surviving Thanksgiving Dinner, 2016 Edition appeared first on Just Laugh.

I was probably in grade school and it was what we had lying around the fridge, so it made a fine sandwich that I ate for lunch on many an occasion without really ever thinking much of it.

When all you’ve ever tasted is bologna, it tastes just fine, but once you’ve had something else to compare it to like smoked ham or honey-glazed turkey or even grilled chicken, you finally start to realize that bologna tastes sort of … wrong.

Sure, bologna is what you were used to eating for years, however it’s amazing what broadening your horizons to consider that there are other lunch meats out there – some that you can’t even imagine like mortadella or bresaola – can do for the way that you look at your second meal of the day! Instantly a whole new world of sandwiches opens up to you with a seemingly endless combination of meats, cheeses, vegetables, and condiments – infinite possibilities to satiate your midday hunger and enough options to make yourself a different sandwich every single day of the year…

The key is simply opening your mind to the notion of lunch meats other than bologna.

Accepting things that are different is always hard, especially when you’ve only ever been exposed to a limited worldview with regards to lunch meat – perhaps through no fault of your own, but simply because bologna is all that your local delicatessen ever seemed to carry. However the world in which we live is bigger than just our own personal lunch counters of choice and whether we chose to enjoy all of their assorted sweet and savory flavors or not for ourselves, those deli meats represent a delicious array of diversity that has plenty to offer both the culinary world as well as sandwich lovers to boot.

Even as you’re reading this, I’m sure that some people are thinking, “But I don’t need any of those fancy lunch meats – I like bologna!”

And it’s true that you could certainly continue making bland, mediocre sandwiches piled high with bologna until the day you die, but what I’m trying to say is that you’d be missing out on so many great sandwiches – ham and swiss on rye, pastrami club, chicken salad on whole wheat with a pickle wedge on the side – that maybe it’s time to stop fearing all of those other choices and just try one in your sandwich for lunch today.

Something simple – maybe a nice hickory smoked ham on white bread with American cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, and some honey mustard.

Throw on a couple of strips of bacon if you’re feeling adventurous!

And then as you sink your teeth into that first bite that mixes ham, cheese, and all of those condiments together in a delightful flurry of lunchtime flavor, try to think about the last bologna sandwich you had that really tasted as satisfying as that hickory smoked ham does dancing on your tastebuds with just the right flavor spike of mustard and cheese…

Some of your bologna-eating friends might look at you odd, and we can’t expect everyone to change all at once … but that’s ok. This is a personal decision between you and your lunch menu that you’re ready to move beyond bologna to better tasting and frankly more appealing lunch meats … ones that don’t leave that inexplicable bleh taste in your mouth after taking your last bite.

We live in a nation where a lot of people for some reason still like bologna, but a growing majority of us don’t, and it’s time to understand why as you try some of these other flavors that we’ve all been enjoying and perhaps find that maybe the bologna you’ve grown accustomed to really isn’t quite as “fine” as you’ve been telling yourself all of these years.

It’s going to be ok, and your relationship with your lunch is going to be even better for it.

God bless American cheese!

The post Red, White & Bologna appeared first on Just Laugh.

Oh, so many kids! 

But then again, I was still in my twenties so in retrospect maybe it was primarily the kids because here we are now a decade later and not only do I live smack dab in the middle of suburbia, but I actually kind of like it here, too! The houses all looking the same means I don’t have to live next to the guy who decides he’s going to paint his house pink just because, and as for the SUVs and minivans … well, you’d be surprised at how many of those kids you can’t fit in the backseat of a convertible.

That said, the suburbs aren’t entirely perfect, and if I had to pick just one flaw – say for the sake of writing a weekly humor column, for example – my biggest complaint about suburbia would have to be the lack of storage.

Because we basically have none.

If you’ve ever wondered why you see cars in every single driveway while you’re driving around suburbia, it’s not because we’re copious The Price is Right contestants and are all lucky enough to have new cars coming out of our ears! Since I moved to my first house in suburbia with its 42.5 square inch front lawn, I don’t think I’ve ever met somebody who actually parks their car inside their own garage … because instead every garage in suburbia is filled with boxes and bags and holiday decorations that could otherwise be stored indoors, but not in suburbia.

2.5 children, 1.5 bathrooms, .001% closet space

Back when I lived up in Michigan, we had these magical things called basements that were basically like a whole nother house for you to store all of the extra crap in from your regular house. Sure, they got a little dank and moldy, and in the wintertime – which was thirteen months out of the year – they had a tendency to turn into these dark, windowless ice caverns where you were never sure if you were going to wake up in the next morning, or if you did, you wondered whether you’d be staring down the business end of a polar bear if you did…

But the storage space was second to none!

Unfortunately you can’t build basements in Florida because swamp water and alligators tend to be unusually harsh on a family’s knickknacks and Christmas decorations. And driving the 1,382 miles back to Michigan just to store things in my Mom’s basement at this point seems inefficient at best, so instead here I am stuck stacking boxes upon boxes of all the things I’ve ever owned, but don’t have the heart to pitch out because I haven’t touched them in the last five years until my humble garage is just about bursting at the seams with old college textbooks and inflatable Santas and tools that I’m honestly not sure I even know how to operate.

…not to mention the fact that we’re trying to add two more kids to a house that for the last several years has been just fine without two more kids, and all of the miniature baggage that they will need stored as well…

Where all of the stuff is supposed to go, I have no idea!

Maybe if Florida is too ill-equipped to have basements, instead we could just start selling our suburban homesteads in pairs so that you’ve got one house to live in and a second one next door to accumulate all of your crap, err, I mean priceless treasures from over the years!

Or maybe I just need to have a garage sale … as in, sell the entire garage – for one low price! … and then start over fresh with an empty garage and a clean palate waiting to be filled with new worthless treasures of every shape and size and color and odor!

Double-decker garage, dig a giant pit in the backyard and just start tossing things in – I’m definitely open to options here.

If I were to casually leave a box or two of random knickknacks at lost and founds at the grocery store or the local library, I wonder how long I would have until they finally caught onto my sneaky storage scheme and kicked my hopeless treasures to the curb???

The post Never Enough Storage appeared first on Just Laugh.

Judging by the number of groans as you all reluctantly clicked on this link, I don’t even have to tell you that IT’S PUMPKIN TIME!!! because by now you’ve got pumpkin coming out of your ears, and rolling out from underneath your couch, and following you inconspicuously down the street like some sort of modern remake of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes … but let’s not give Hollywood any more bad ideas here…

Say what you will, but Pumpkin Spice Lattes are here to stay, along with Pumpkin Spice Cheerios and even Pumpkin Spice chewing gum because as far as Our All-Knowing Pumpkin Authority is concerned, this time of year there really isn’t a reason for anything that you stick into your mouth to not be filled with those delicious flavors of cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger and allspice and cloves … whatever the hell cloves are, anyways!

You won’t find a food that says fall more than pumpkin … mainly because all of the other ones are literally buried behind mountains upon mountains of pumpkin food products to the point where I’m honestly surprised that grandma’s old-fashioned apple pie even bothers showing up anymore. Caramel and cinnamon and maple sure would be swell, but unless they’ve been blended with that addictive orange puree, it ain’t getting premium shelf space in any grocery store that you’d dare to set foot in on a Tuesday afternoon between pilates and picking up the kiddos from soccer practice.

Some would argue that our pumpkin obsession has gotten excessive, possibly even borderline manic with each bite of the pumpkin scones that we’re eating one in each hand some sort of autumnal cry for help as we swirl helplessly like fallen oak leaves caught in the peaceful fall breeze until finally plummeting down to earth to ultimately be enveloped by the untimely blanket of snow that old man winter cruelly brings.

I wouldn’t argue that, mind you, because I love pumpkin!

But admittedly I can kind of see where some might claim that their own particular seasons of preference can’t hold a candle to autumn’s pumpkin fetish, though frankly I think it’s mostly because those other seasons simply aren’t bringing their a-game to the dinner table. I mean, winter is solid because Christmastime is loaded with gingerbread and peppermint and sugar cookies, but really, what’ve the other two got?!

Summertime has lemonade and hotdogs; springtime has love and regret for Valentine’s Day and sugar-flavored Peeps for Easter. It’s time to step up or quit your bitchin’ if marshmallow Peeps and Ballpark franks are the best you’ve got to offer, other seasons!

And by the way, when did we hit the age when we finally realized that the likes of Peeps and candy corn – both of which are essentially pure sugar – are also essentially pure garbage???

Ironically enough, I’ve actually tasted both Pumpkin Spice Peeps and pumpkin candy corn … not those ones deceptively shaped like pumpkins, but actually pumpkin flavored candy corn … and sadly not even the whimsical magic of pumpkin spice could redeem these sugary dental visits … at least not for anybody over the age of seven, anyways.

Perhaps the reason why pumpkin is so popular this time of year is simply because pumpkin delivers where all of these other so-called “iconic seasonal favorites” seem to fall short. You may not be one to appreciate the delicate flavor dance of sweet spices that tantalizes the palates of so many of us pointed pumpkin fans each and every fall afternoon, but maybe you’re the kind of person who still sleeps with his blankey at 35 years-old and watches Caillou unironically every Saturday morning!

Maybe you need to take a good, hard look at your life and ask yourself – is it really the pumpkins that I have a problem with here???

Then shut up and eat your Pumpkin Pop-Tarts because they’re only here for a limited time!

The post A Celebration of Fall Flavors, But Mostly … Who Are We Kidding?! appeared first on Just Laugh.

I keep trying to figure out how we got ourselves to this point … one minute Trump was little more than a bad hair joke and a guy with a reality TV catchphrase and the next he’s standing behind a podium talking about building walls and everyone being a bunch of losers – it felt like I was back in elementary school gym class all over again! The only thing his rhetoric was missing was a scathing dialog in front of all my friends about how I’ll never learn the pommel horse if my 4th grade self doesn’t start to take whatever that day in gym class was supposed to be about more seriously…

And yet as insulting and tyrannical The Donald sounds whenever someone is foolish enough to hand him a live mic, a lot of people seem won over by Donald Trump.

“He speaks what’s on his mind,” they say.

The problem is that in this case his mind happens to be inside the head of Donald Trump, which we’re finding is apparently also filled with sexist remarks leftover from the 1950’s, the vocabulary and attention span of a fourth grader, and an entire truckload of what has got to be the ugliest campaign slogan hats that anyone who never wears hats has been forced to wear!

But Donald Trump is the man who’s going to Make America Great Again.

I can’t say it with a straight face anymore than I could ever say, “Sure, Arnold Schwarzenegger seems just as qualified to be governor as anybody else!” or “I’m sure Sarah Palin knew exactly what she meant about reading those newspapers…”

Sure, he’s entertaining, and sure, he’s made a lot of money in business by learning how to exploit that one loophole that I guess says that running out of money and not being able to pay your bills is a perfectly normal part of being a business in America, but he doesn’t have to be our president.

A lot of people admire Snooki from the Jersey Shore, but that doesn’t mean she’s next in line for Secretary of State.

Look, I know that America is kind of down on its luck right now after almost eight years under the scary black man who wanted to give everybody access to healthcare and just asked that maybe we try to stop shooting each other in the meantime, but can’t we set our sights for Obama’s successor just a little bit higher than Donald Trump??? I mean, are we really taking serious the guy who keeps promising to bring back millions of jobs to America when the thing he’s most widely known for is firing people on national television?!

I get that for some it doesn’t feel like there are any other options – Bernie Sanders is for income equality, Hillary Clinton is for email equality, and Donald Trump thinks that Muslims and Mexicans are the only thing holding the United States back from sainthood if they could just take a hike and put up a 20-foot wall behind themselves on the way out. I’m just saying that if we’re going to pick a reality TV star to be our next president, there are still plenty of ones left on the table who aren’t Donald Trump…

• Jeff Probst – host of the reality show Survivor … the guy is polite, knows how to start a fire, and could probably spice up immigration reform with all sorts of exciting tribal challenges to keep Americans tuning in week after week!
• Hulk Hogan – star of the VH1 hit Hogan Knows Best … everybody already knows that the Hulk don’t take crap from nobody, and not for nothing but he could probably use the paycheck right now…
• Ty Pennington – host of Extreme Makover: Home Edition … another perfectly nice guy who, let’s face it, has just the kind of charisma we need to help more people actually feel a little compassion for the nation’s sick, hungry, and those in need of a newly constructed 47-bedroom split-level McMansion in which to hang their hats…

All I’m saying is, we’ve got choices, America. We don’t have to elect Donald Trump just because he says the things that your Republican uncle says at Thanksgiving after he’s had one too many helpings of mashed potatoes. If we’re destined to elect a reality TV star to be the next President of the United States, the least we can do is try to pick one who’s actually a nice guy.

The post Donald Harumph appeared first on Just Laugh.

I also can’t help but think that there’s a good chance I might roll out of my bed and plummet to a horrifying demise during my sleep because I definitely neglected to bring my safety harness when I set off on this grand bedroom adventure some time ago…

Earlier this week I found myself doing one of the most grown-up things a guy can do aside from purchasing life insurance and getting your will in order – I bought some new furniture, specifically for my bedroom, because that’s what older people do instead of spending their money on cool things like jet skis and video game systems. Nothing says, “My life is full of youthful excitement…” like a man holding a receipt for a 7-piece bedroom set in dazzling off-white with brushed nickel hardware and one drawer that doesn’t open quite right, but I’m probably not going to complain just because it would be too much of a hassle to have them come back.

It’s even got one of those little benches at the end of the bed to sit on because, well, old people tire easily and need someplace to rest for a bit when we get too excited about things like our new matching bedroom furniture. 

The real excitement, mind you, came from the unexpected discovery that apparently our old bedroom furniture featured a bed that was … how do I put this gently? … height-wise comparable to a little person, though 100% more comfortable with me sleeping on it for roughly eight hours every evening! My new bed, on the other hand, is roughly 47,000-feet tall, to my best approximation, to the point where I can sit on the edge and my feet can’t touch the floor – a feat I happily haven’t experienced since I was SEVEN YEARS OLD!!!

As I eluded to earlier, I’m a fully grown man … arguably a little too fully grown, if you were to consult a scale or my doctor, but either way at this point in my life I like to think that I’m pretty well equipped to handle just about any task that the world happens to throw at me. And yet figuring out how I’m going to climb into bed at night surprisingly isn’t one of those tasks which I was expecting. I suppose I could do like my dog does and just sort of fling my entire body into the air and hope for the best – traditionally that technique has worked ok for her most of the time, but falling short of the bed is something that drunk people do.

And children.

But not adults like me who don’t get to wear footie pajamas or stay up playing Halo until three o’clock on the morning because their only obligation for the entire day is a practice exam at 2:30pm and hacky sack in the quad afterwards. No self-respecting man wants to need a good boost when he’s ready to retire for the evening, or a step ladder, or one of those mechanized chair thingys that old people use to transport themselves up stairs, but in this case it’s just me trying to get into bed like a schlub!

There’s no reason for modern bedroom furniture to be this tall. I go to the barber once a month just like I’m supposed to, so there’s no justification for my head being that close to the ceiling fan when I get up every morning. The sun doesn’t come up any sooner way up here than it does back down on Earth, and aside from adding a very real thrill of falling to my otherwise mundane, plummeting nightmares, the extra elevation certainly isn’t going to help me sleep any better than when I slept safely down on the ground as god intended.

I guess that’s how they get you, though – these sneaky furniture salesmen and their tilt-wearing sales tactics … what’s a six-foot, 30-something to do but strap on his snowshoes and dig out his trusty hiking stick, and pull down those goofy goggles that mountain climbers wear to keep from being blinded by the glare of the sun across the expansive wasteland of vertical ice and snow that surrounds them.

No one should need to keep a helicopter airlift on standby for his inevitable evacuation from attempting to scale his own bed, but this is the world we live in today, and today our beds are very, very tall.

The post The High Climb to a Good Night’s Sleep appeared first on Just Laugh.

At least if you’re one of the birds stuck in that dreadful song, you’ve got some backup in case one of your feathered friends unexpectedly comes down with the bird flu. Plus, the guy receiving all of that stuff is no doubt so busy cleaning up bird poop from that aviary of a Christmas gift that he’s probably not likely to notice if he’s a few birds or lords or whatever short by the end of it all anyways…

But alas, the world that I live in is not The Twelve Days of Christmas and I don’t have a fellow french hen or two whom I can call on to flutter around putting up lights and wrapping presents while I’ve been laid up in bed the last couple of days, sniffling like I’ve got nothing better to do but chug chicken noodle soup and watch National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation on repeat until Clark’s extended family finally shows him a little respect and gets out there to help him with his holiday lighting dilemma instead of just lounging around inside all day like a bunch of schlubs!

Time is precious, especially during the month of December when every hour that passes is one more closer to Santa’s big arrival and one less to enjoy the most magical, commercially fantastical time of the year. And yet for every kleenex that I fill and every swig of strange, green nasal medicine that I throw back, I can’t help but count my time lost in sales on presents overlooked or plates of freshly made peanut butter fudge left untouched by these peanut butter-lovin’ hands.

Now it’s not uncommon for me to find myself sick come January, and who really cares then because January sucks! What do I have to miss out on then – Florida’s week and a half of sub-optimal weather and two weeks of dieting that I’ll have given up by the third anyways?!

November, January, even June – these are good months for getting sick in my book. 

There’s not much going on, plenty of time to catch up on my reading, and hey, if it’s June we’re talking about, here in Florida it’ll be upwards of 180 degrees outside during the afternoon and I really have no intention of going outside anyways!

Christmastime just doesn’t work for me, though, which is something that I gladly would’ve explained to the microscopic germs capable of ruining one’s prime shopping and baking days if they had simply taken a few moments to consult my preferred timeframes for coughing up a lung like any decent viral and/or bacterial infection would do for its host. I mean, I get that they’ve got quotas to fill and everything, too, but so do I and the fourteen bags of gifts hidden strategically throughout my house aren’t going to wrap themselves in these precious moments leading up to Christmas Eve when I dream of being able to actually relax with a mug of hot chocolate in one hand and absolutely nothing to keep me up scrambling until four in the morning like I totally had to do last year.

I just want a nice, normal, marginally sane Christmas where I get to enjoy every last drop of the holiday spirit that drives me to get out of bed the other eleven months out of the year, and then I promise that as soon as we roll over into the new year, I’ll go right back to being sick as a dog for as long as you need me to be…

Seriously, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to lose, like, 40 pounds, so feel free to take as much of my January time as you need – just so long as you spare my turtle doves and other miscellaneous, holiday fowl for now.

The post The Immune System of a French Hen appeared first on Just Laugh.

I try not to make every single one of these columns lately about my son, but then again, something tells me that fifteen years from now when our primary interactions consist mostly of “Can I borrow the car keys, Dad?” and “Can I borrow your wallet, too, because gas now costs $47 a gallon, Dad?!”, jokey thingys like this might not necessarily be the first thing that comes to mind.

Also, I’m probably going to have to get a real job if gas does make it up to $47 a gallon!

Ha ha ha – just kidding! There’s no way we’re going to have any gas left fifteen years from now to be worth $47 a gallon, anyways…

Regardless, right now my one and a half year-old son is absolutely hilarious even if it’s most definitely very much unintentional at the time. For example, just now he came running up to me as happy as can be only wearing one shoe and when I asked where his other shoe went, my wife simply called back from the other room, “I tried to put it back on but he only wanted to wear one of them…”

Or how the other night I watched him spend a solid forty-five minutes in his absolute glory just sitting on the floor in the kitchen, meticulously moving the dog’s food from one bowl to the other a single piece at a time like it was the most important job in the world.

I’ve also noticed lately how he seems to get into the biggest fits of giggles when he farts, but honestly I think it’s probably safe to say that he might’ve picked that one up from me!

More and more, though, watching my son bounce around the room like a goofy, little super ball fueled by apple juice and Teddy Grahams, it really is like looking at a little mini-me … which is kind of weird because it’s hard to picture myself ever having that much energy, but the borderline uncontrollable silliness is certainly a familiar trait that I’m sure we’re eventually going to have to go to great lengths to temper, or at the very least get used to explaining when he’s reciting entire episodes of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse while hanging upside-down on the jungle gym at the playground, “It’s ok – he’ll come back down after he’s done doing The Hotdog Dance…”

But I guess that’s really just another one of these fun parts about having kids – seeing how they look like you and talk like you and eventually what sorts of bizarre neuroses they develop that are going to drive the people around them absolutely bonkers in the years to come! So what if you can’t go to Target anymore because he likes to chew on the shopping carts there or if his best friend is an imaginary pickle that tells him to keep trying to ride the dog around the house like the mighty stallion that she most definitely isn’t?! 

Some of us take pills for our neuroses, and some of us write humor columns, and some of us walk around the house only wearing one shoe.

Who knows – if that whole gas thing dries up, maybe all of that extra walking will persuade him to find that other shoe on his own after all…

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