Everything's ready. But there's not that much in the "everything" department, these days. The gifts are wrapped (too many! my wife says. Hah: wait until she opens them. I practically split a jigsaw puzzle in four boxes.) I walked around downtown and heard concerts in the lobbies. I gave a thumbs up to the man in the Santa hat playing Christmas songs on the 16-note keyboard in the City Hall lobby:

I went on a fruitless search for frozen hashbrowns, something my wife couldn't find at the store yesterday. I drove to five grocery storeis. FIVE. For forty minutes I was chatting with Astrid in Walberswick, and she heard me express hashbrown frustration in three locales while she sat in her kitchen in England. Then I took a nap and woke to the smell of cinnamon-dusted pecans roasting in the oven. Best pre-holiday day ever.

So what shall we do here now? Odds and ends, tidying up, poking through the thick XMAS BLEAT folder.

From the distant past, greetings!

Doesn't seem that long ago. At the time, of course, I thought 1942 was the other side of some vast chronological expanse.

And what did they want at the end of 1941? Crispness!

Yes, thanks to Proctor ingenuity, you can have consistently burnt toast every time!

Mind you, DEFENSE COMES FIRST. This ad was assembled before Pearl Harbor, but everyone knew something was coming. Something big and bad. Every ad had something that assured everyone we were tooling up in every way - heck, they won't dare start something.

They won't dare.

Well, what else have we in the Xmas bin? There's always Smokesmas:

I've had this hanging around for a while; might as well drop it. Lindy's influence:

The ads are for typewriters, sleds, bugles, and guns.

Anything else? Well, it is Friday. And so:

Solution, as we like to say on Fridays, is here.

That'll do. We'll be back next week in a strange, semi-hiatal state. Daily Bleats, but no updates. See you Monday.

Merry Christmas, my friends.