I don't know why I haven't posted this before, but after recently sending the link to a friend of mine, I finally realized that other people might be interested to read my thoughts on Christmas. Be forewarned that this article was for a Jewish website, so it's a little...Jewey. But I think it adequately sums up my feelings on the matter:
     Christmas Blues

    Today was interesting for two reasons. Firstly, unrelated to Christmas, an occasional professor visited the bookshop today. I was in his Winter Study class during my freshman year at college, a course on parody. It was out of this course that few of us decided to co-found the campus humor magazine, the Mad Cow. He saw me, we said the usual hellos to vague acquaintences who haven't seen each other in half a decade, and then he told me something very interesting.

    He said he stole a joke of mine in his new book of short stories. Apparently when I had written a sci-fi parody for his class, he thought a joke I used was really good, although he didn't say it at the time. Now it's in his book, although it was unacknowledged until he saw me today. He said, "If I'd known I was going to see you again, I might have acknowledged you."-- which I thought was pretty funny.

    Anyway, he showed me the paragraph, but I didn't remember writing anything like that.

    The other thing today is about Christmas at the bookshop. We received a fair number of Christmas books over the past week or two, but today's shipment was mostly non-Christmassy. There were some children's books (including Encyclopedia Brown, an old favorite from my youth), some trashy mass-market thrillers, and a bunch of philosophy books.

    The philosophy books had very plain covers. There were eight of them, all from the same series, with names like "On Chomsky" and "On Derrida". I was pleased that at least we were getting philosophical texts rather than Christmas schlock. Then after I stacked the series on the cart, I looked at the spines and laughed at what I saw:

On Eco
On Derrida
On Davidson
On Kripke

On Popper
On Fodor
On Dennett
On Chomsky

    Ho Ho Ho.