Good Lord, it’s 2005 already, and I haven’t finished my story, which now seems completely boring, and I’m not really sure why the heck I started it in the first place.

Suffice it to say, however, that a good time was had by all. I also cannot resist further rubbing your nose in the nice weather down there; we ate outside in the early afternoon sun before retiring at dusk to the indoors of the ancestral home and its cheerfully roaring fire. It was all very nice, and I won’t bore you with the details, in the spirit of Christmas peace towards all.

Happily, this Christmas has had two lasting, positive impacts. The first was that I was able to sell one of my brothers-in-law on a new iBook to replace his 7-year-old (!) Windows laptop. Welcome to the cult, my brother. It is with unabashed glee that I contemplate the horror this will inflict on my other brother-in-law, a hardcore Linux CLI geek, whose utter disdain for anything not scratch-built and completely open-source has caused me to roll many a jaundiced eye when he launches into one of his stock polemics about the virtues of running a 12-year-old beta test of an operating system.

The second was a happy accidental discovery that I am glad to share with all and sundry. I found that caramel cream liqueur is absolutely sensational in eggnog. It’s way, way better than brandy could ever hope to be. Anybody who still prefers a "splash" of brandy after drinking this mixture is really only drinking it to mask their thirst for the hard stuff. For those people, please stop the charade and just grab a snifter, already. You’re depriving others of the precious, precious nog. If you’ve still got some eggnog around the house, try it. If not, just wait ’til next year. I guarantee happy results.