Before the Christmas season is too far gone and everyone turns off their internet for the rest of the year, the following guide to Christmas entries from the Midlife Crisis Crossover back catalog is provided here as a value-added holiday gift for any new MCC followers who joined us in 2013, for longtime MCC readers who love themed compilations, or for incorrigible MCC spammers who need new pages to infiltrate. If you’re running low on online reading matter or are interested in seeing the state of MCC ’round this time last year, these free samples are just what the MCC programming department ordered.

PLEASE NOTE: the presentation of this clipfest does not mean I’m going on hiatus until January like a network TV show. I’m still allowing for a day off each week, as I’ve been doing for the past several months, but I expect to stick around and do my part to fill the void left behind by other bloggers jetting off to Grandma’s or Antigua or whatever. To me, holidays don’t seem like a time for not writing. Also, if I take more than one day off per week, site traffic paranoia kicks in and I have to breathe into a paper bag for a few hours, until enough internet wanderers click on that one undying, year-old Wreck-It Ralph entry to make me feel useful again.

Enjoy! And if I don’t see you before then: Merry Christmas!

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* “What Christmas is All About: an Imaginary Dramatic Reading” — The meat of this entry is shown above, but the link contains a couple more notes for temporal context.

* “The Time-Honored Family Tradition of the Overwhelming Christmas To-Do List” — A thorough encapsulation of how the average Christmas celebrant’s chore checklist quintuples every December, as if peace and love are supposed to increase our burdens and sap our strength. Funny, last year’s to-do list looks a lot like this year’s. It even includes a Hobbit movie. What are the odds?

* “The Songs That Sweeten My Christmas Spirit” — My personal top-10 Christmas songlist, mostly comprised of tracks that The MAN won’t let you hear on commercial radio, not when millions of listeners are apparently calling their local stations and clamoring for them to replay Wham!’s “Last Christmas” again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.

* “The Songs That Sour My Christmas Spirit” — My personal bottom-8 Christmas songlist, guaranteed to drive me out of a room if played all in a row, for reasons stated therein. Contemporary postscript: this year I’ve seen a few commentators defending “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” on the grounds that the lady in the song is perfectly aware of what’s going on and is totally “owning” her sexuality by deciding for herself whether or not to spend the night with her host and possibly share Christmas breakfast. Somehow that interpretation doesn’t make the song feel any more endearing or Christmassy to me.

* “A Scorecard for Judging Your Christmas Gifts” — Ever wanted to know how to judge how much your family and friends really love you on a scale from 1 to 10, based on what they give you for Christmas? I’ve demystified the process and shown you exactly how! If you really want to liven up your family gathering, rate your gifts and then force everyone to stand and line up in order from loves-you-most to wants-you-deadest. Oh, the discussions you’ll have!

* “Wheelchair Adventure Requires Maniac Driver to Decelerate from 60 to 0” — Each year my wife and I escort her grandmother through the Christmas Gift & Hobby Show held at the Indiana State Fairgrounds. Last year was our first time navigating the crowds with her in a wheelchair, with interesting results. Also, I took photos of Christmas objects and posted some in that entry, so hurray for Christmas colors and such.

(This year’s show wasn’t covered here because it ultimately wasn’t as photogenic, but you can expect some other kind of new, Christmas-themed MCC photo gallery here in the next few days. Because Christmas!)