IT'S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS

 I am a little confused. Are we in the pre-black Friday blowout period or the pre-pre Christmas moment? Are these the best deals I can get or am I waiting for the best, best deals?

And what is this with TV's? How can it be that a 24 pack of toilet paper costs more than a 50 inch television with built in Roku and a 12 month free subscription to the New Yorker as an added bonus?

And speaking of magazine subscriptions, why can I get 99.5 per cent off of every list price? I mean I can pick up the December 1 issue at the newsstand for $6.99 or get 2 years delivered through the mail at 3 cents a week. It is like asking if you want to pick what is behind door one or two, when you already know that the first one has a million dollars stashed there and the other a copy of your mother's recipe for dried-out lamb chops with mint jelly.

This is a disorienting time for sure. One day falling into the next as we wait for our regularly scheduled program called normal life to begin again. And this time of year can be particularly confusing even in the best of times. As we drive around and see houses dressed up in their finest Christmas attire, Santa ready to put his ample backside down a possibly non-cooperative chimney, Rudolph warming up on the front lawn doing some calisthenics. Is November the new December?

I have too much time on my hands and thus my thoughts tend to wander further away from my brain. I mean if we can play the Masters golf tournament in mid-November why do we have to keep any other event fixed on the calendar? Why can't we swap out Christmas and Thanksgiving? Easter where New Year's Eve normally sits. Graduation the first instead of the last day of school. How about dinner at breakfast and Tuesday three times in March and everyday in April?

Everything after all is but a social construct. I mean it is what it is because that is what we say it is. But what if we didn't say it is, but said it might not be, or even that it wasn't? What if we made up a whole set of new rules?

Oh wait, the orange man already stole that idea. 

And we do want a sense of stability, of constancy, this year more than ever. We do need to understand that double stuffed oreos is going a bridge too far, that stop lights aren't a request but a demand, that giving myself every putt under four feet does not make me a bad person. 

If rules like this don't exist, then we are left with anarchy. What would prevent snow from falling in Newark, New Jersey on July 4th or day deciding it would rather be night?

No, there are some things that must remain immutable. Like me getting up to pee every two hours. Or free refills of beverages at fast food restaurants.

Let me just wish everyone a happy holiday season, free from the burdens that have befallen us this year, secure in the knowledge that we reside in the most stable democracy the world has ever known, for the past four years housed in the small hands of a very stable genius.

Is there no more sanity clause?