Happy Drooltide

This holiday stuff has us all nuts. The nightly news says people are shoplifting to beat the band and now even the guys behind the counter are punching out the very stick-up artists who come to rob them. So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to see what they’ve done at my supermarket.I was about 100 feet away from the place last night when I passed these kids coming out, just a coupla sixth grade boys with their giant clown-sized feet and their backpacks and their hair flopping over their eyes – but then there was this SMELL that was wafting after them.“Patchouli?" I thought. But they were young to be wearing Patchouli, which Wikipedia says enjoyed a ‘surge in popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly among devotees of free love and the hippie lifestyle (with hypertext just like that so that people born in what - the 1880s? - can click on the words and see what they mean.)I even turned around to watch after them I was so flummoxed – right up until I myself had stepped inside the store, to discover that some national gang in Management had set off a sneaky little stink bomb to stimulate happy buying. The whole place had been “scented,” maybe through the air conditioning ducts and there were my plain old pals, the white-haired butcher with his bloody apron, the cheery retirees manning the registers, all forced to work in this strange lab-concocted snowdome of eau de cinnamon, nutmeg and pine boughs with just a subliminal whiff of, was that, WHISKEY for the cooking? CANNIBIS for the cook? Something smoky, anyway.It’s supposed to smell as though Pappy’s apple cider is just steamin’ away on the fire, over by those poor naked chickens riding the rotisserie broomstick i guess; as though the purtiest pies you ever did see are cooling’ on the shelves over there by Women’s Needs.It was a little disturbing to say the least. But hey if that’s what they want to do, fine. You can imbue me with so much of the stuff that angry birds peck me death when I go outside, like they did in the Weekly world News to that guy with the bad B.O. Just for heaven’s sake HOLD THE CHRISTMAS MUSIC or else I am hunting down the very descendants of Johnny Mathis AND Mr. Bingity-Bong Little Drummer-Boy Crosby, and even sweet tiny Brenda Lee with her Jingle Bell Rock and tying them to chairs and playing Sleigh Ride at them til they grind all their teeth unto tiny stumps.There. I feel better. Happy Drooltide y’all. I'll try to write again tomorrow, just let me find my holiday headband.