Hey everyone.  I hope you had a really great holiday, and I’m glad to be back.

And now that the Christmas season is in full swing, and the decorations are up and the shopping has begun, I have to say something…

…My family is being a huge pain.

Seriously, they haven’t really done this before.  But they’re totally hosing me when it comes to Christmas lists.  We all enjoy giving each other some small gift for Christmas.  Hopefully, gifts are practical, meaningful, and useful, rather than total crap. 

But they’re completely making that impossible this year.  No one will tell me anything they want for Christmas!  I grilled my brother for fifteen minutes, asking him if he even needed any tools.  He said no.  When his wife said he needs a shovel, he flatly denied it.  Same with my parents.  For the first time, I have very little to go on when it comes to Christmas shopping this year.

So today, I’m running down the list of possible gift ideas in the hopes that maybe you, my ever-helpful readers can assist me in shopping for my tight-lipped family.  If they aren’t going to make a Christmas list, I guess I’ll have to.

Matt Makes a Christmas List For His Family

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Thanksgiving is kind of an ironic holiday.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love Thanksgiving.  It’s great to be with family and spend the day together.  I love food too, so that’s good.

It’s just that Thanksgiving, this day where we say “I have enough,” now kicks off a month long orgy of ravenous consumerism where we scurry around saying, “I don’t have enough!”

A month is barely enough time for our shopping, as some black Friday sales begin at midnight on Thanksgiving.  The conflict between the spirit of Thanksgiving and the spirit of black Friday is amazing.

So before we get our day of thanks over with and start our month of “I want,” I’ve got a few thoughts.

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Happy Friday, humans!  I’ve got a very special guest for you today, and it happens to be my very first video blog post.

Ever since I traded blog platforms and stopped making you type annoying nonsense words to comment, I have been inundated with comments from spammers.  I literally get 3 spam comments for every comment you post.  Some are vulgar.  Others are insulting, like they’re just phoning it in with a list of Russian web links, and they expect me to be fooled.  Others have language so broken, it seems they were written by chimps.  But a few are truly, ridiculously memorable, and those make it all worth it.

My favorite spammer is Dolores, who I found out is actually human, a grandmother no less, on Facebook, and lives in my town!  She’s spammed everyone from Huffington Post to Matthew Paul Turner with irrelevant, blathering comments about “high tech aliens propagating humans” in such garbled language, it makes my head hurt.

Today, I have my first ever video post about my real life encounter with a spammer.  Yes, almost everything the spammer says is quoted from spam comments I’ve recieved.  Check it out, and then share your most memorable spam, or make up your own spam comment!

So, some people seem to be just a wee bit upset about the new airport security screenings.

Apparently from the “bits and pieces” I’ve seen…(wink), you can either have an ample dose of nuclear radiation spilled all over your body, while an image of you, nude, is projected onto an IMAX size stereoscopic 3D movie screen, or you can have your “junk” fumbled with by a friendly TSA representative / convicted sex offender in the backseat of a car.  Either way, people are getting their underwear in a bunch over it all.  Heh.

So among stories of screaming three year olds and elderly nuns being frisked…thoroughly, a bunch of people it seems are going to boycott the “naked scanners” in favor of the pat down the day before Thanksgiving. 

I’m all about civil disobedience, so I’ve got some thoughts to help you prepare for your Thanksgiving travels.

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This weekend, I saw The Execution of Christ.

No, it’s not a new film you somehow haven’t heard of.  It’s an art installation.  It was happenstance and unexpected, really, that I saw it while out and about running errands. 

The artists the Chinese Gao brothers, whose father died in a re-education camp under Chairman Mao.  (Official reports are he killed himself, though it’s more likely he was shot to death.)  The whole exhibit centered around the brothers coming to terms with China’s identity crisis in the decades after the Cultural Revolution.

The centerpiece is an illustration of Mao’s policy of stamping out religion in China.  Six life size bronze Chairman Maos take aim, firing squad style at an emaciated, nearly naked Jesus.  To stand behind Jesus and look down the barrels of six rifles was one of the most affecting religious experiences I’ve ever had…and in an art museum, no less.  I left the room in silence, as if I were in a sacred place.

If this exhibition is coming to your city, or even your state, you must see it.  But reflecting on the exhibition got me thinking about a few things in our own culture.

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Wow, can you believe we’re less than a couple of weeks away from Thanksgiving?

It feels like we just had Halloween twelve days ago, and now we’re about to officially begin the “holiday” season.

I’ve always liked Thanksgiving.  Easily the best use of an otherwise useless Thursday ever.  We used to combine it with Christmas as a kid when we’d visit the grandparents.  That pretty much ruled, even with Grandma cursing loudly in the kitchen over dinner.  But even without the gifts, and without Grandma, it’s still a pretty good day.

This year, my wife and I are hosting Thanksgiving for the first time.  We’re pretty pumped.  For one thing, most of the food is being brought to us, and that rules.  But we are both good cooks, and we’re going to show off a little bit on the food we are making. 

I have to admit, I can do without the green bean casserole.  It just doesn’t do anything for me, except for the canned fried onions.  However, I could eat an entire can of cranberry sauce, and I have accomplished this on several occasions.  I am contemplating doing this again.  I guess everyone’s got one holiday dish they don’t like, but one of my students told me this week that she doesn’t like pie.  Kids sure are dumb sometimes.

We also have a requisite number of games we play.  My family is full of loud talkers, minus my wife, so we like to play “Pit” and pretend to be on the stock exchange floor.  We used to make Christmas ornaments as kids, and I’m thinking we’re going to bring that back.  I’m guessing my brother’s ornament making skills will be at about the same level as they were when he was five, which is to say his skills were laughable, even for a five year old.

Not on the list of things to do is watching the parade.  I cannot see the point of parades.  Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.  Besides, aren’t cartoon characters slightly more entertaining when they’re doing something besides floating lazily above a street?  Like dropping anvils on each other?  That’s just me though.

So on this light Friday edition of the blog, I want to hear from you what your favorite Thanksgiving traditions are, and what is not on your Thanksgiving to-do or to-eat list.