For the past few years, December has had the uncanny ability to be a watershed month for both joy and cruelty. The Christmas season arrives all wrapped up in a pretty package that contains bad news on my doorstep I couldn’t take one more step. So I didn’t care to write very much. It’s difficult to type with a 50-pound stone strapped to your back.

I used to have a pretty good belly laugh at the expense of people who constantly poured over facebook, twitter and other social media sites. Foursqare. Please. “Here I am everyone! Look at ME!” Don’t be such a stooge for Madison Avenue. Get a life.

Then I stopped posting to my blog.

Those first few weeks of not posting exacerbated my melancholy. I couldn’t put my thumb on it. Then I recognized that old, familiar pang. I got the same blue blues you get from a break-up. As the years peel away, I find there are fewer and fewer people in my social circle. One of Christopher Hitchens’ parting shots before he died was, “As you get older, you realize that you can’t meet any new old friends.” And I realized that over the years, unbeknown to me, this stupid, tedious blog had become an on-call friend. This explains my weird obsession with my comments section. Along with my other issues, I was grieving over the loss of that connection.

Who’s laughing now?

It’s a shame that I didn’t post any photos of the city over Christmas/New Years because that has become one of my favorite holiday traditions. The town gets all gussied up like an old, cheap, broken-down, 10-cent whore on my arm and I like to show her off. Bergdorf had the best window displays I‘ve ever seen. But the few times I sat at a keyboard, all it spat out was dreary junk. And you know what you do with dreary junk, don’t you? You throw it in the garbage.

Thank-you x 1,000 for your thoughtful comments and emails.

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I had these left over in my iPhone. Consider them a late entry for the holiday season.

Not all holiday window displays are of the heartfelt Norman Rockwell/ Hallmark variety, particularly here in New York. A drug store on 57th Street really knows how to get into the spirit of things in a Tim Burton-ish kind of way.

This consumer-crazed holiday shopper…

…is actually a monstrous 8-armed shopaholic, grabbing everything off a store shelf that comes within reach of her tentacles. To hell with credit card limits! This is Christmastime in America, baby!

Poor, clumsy Santa had a Christmas Eve mishap. This’ll be one Christmas morning the kiddies will never forget.

As I gazed into Santa’s glassy, dead eyes, I got the notion that this was once a female. So much gender confusion going on these days!

Ommmmmchristmas.

I’ve been pumping out these stupid posts for close to four years now and have done so selflessly without asking for, nor expecting, any kind of compensation. I do it because I love you all so bloody much. I just want to be your performing chimp. But now it’s time for you guys to step-up, band together and show me a little love. On December 13th, Sotheby’s will hold an important rare book auction here in New York. I think it would be a special treat if you guys could somehow pool your resources and gift the following to me for Christmas:

A first edition of Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger, inscribed to Raymond Chandler: To Ray. With much affection. From Ian.

Are you kidding me?! Do I want a first edition of Goldfinger inscribed by James Bond to Philip Marlowe? Yes, I do! Fleming, a book collector himself, rarely inscribed books. This is an association copy. An association copy is inscribed by the author to someone significant. It could be his wife or his editor or the guy who helped invent L.A. noir detective fiction. Estimate: $60,000-80,000. C’mon guys! You can do it! Pretty please. You can also pick up Chandler’s personal copies of Casino Royale and Live and Let Die, but since they’re not inscribed by Fleming, the estimate is a measly $7,000-10,000.

There’s a large representation of signed Raymond Chandler books in this auction. There are many personal copies, including his own copy of The Big Sleep, lovingly inscribed to himself: For me. Without my compliments. Raymond Chandler. Riverside. February 1, 1939.

Longtime readers know how much Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird means to me. It changed the course of my life. Well, here’s my one and only chance to own a signed first edition. The estimate is $20,000-30,000 but, really, how do you put a price on something that transcends monetary value?

I have a pretty healthy collection of Graham Greene first editions. There’s one title that NEVER comes on the market; his third novel, Rumour at Nightfall. Greene so despised this book that he had it suppressed immediately after its publication. The only way you’re going to read this and find out just how bad it is, is to buy a first edition. And this spectacular example is estimated at $50,000-60,000.

My niece and nephew were in town for the four-day Thanksgiving holiday. The two of them are quite gifted. They show an intelligence and a creativity beyond their years. My father-in-law was doing the New York Times crossword puzzle and he asked my nephew for a four-letter word for karate school. He correctly answered “dojo.” He also identified a passage through time and space as a wormhole. He’s 7-years old. My niece sketched a pear on a table while the other kids sat blank-faced in front of a TV watching Toy Story. She showed the proper light source and correct shading to give it a globular appearance. She’s 9.

I was thinking about all this as I was driving home and then it hit me right between the eyes. The most destructive of all human emotions.

Envy.

Envy, despite the fact that I have two healthy, happy, attractive little girls who I wouldn’t trade for anyone. Envy that my daughters are only well-adjusted and well-behaved, but not academically exceptional.

Enjoys dancing to Mariachi music with a flower in her teeth, 

What the hell’s wrong with me? I’m no better than the creepy parents on the Upper East Side of Manhattan who dress their yuppie larvae in Brooks Brothers finery and jockey to get them into expensive private preschools in the hopes that 18 years from now it’ll be a leg-up when applying to an Ivy League institution, all of which has more to do with the parent’s public image than the welfare of their child.

I’m trying not to be too terribly hard on myself. I’m a firm believer in the old adage that the first step is admitting you have a problem, so thank God I’ve turned that corner. A friend of mine blasted me for being irrational and said I should count my blessings. He cautioned that gifted children can sometimes wind up feeling isolated or be social misfits. Perhaps these silly feelings of mine are nothing more than the small stones that every parent must chew and swallow.

Everyone at work has a nameplate outside their office. Check out this guy’s name:

Gesundheit!

Get it?

If you’re in the U.S., don’t forget to tune in to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade this Thursday morning. It’s nothing more than a three-hour commercial, but I’ve been watching it ever since I was a little kid and wouldn’t miss it. I even attended once! Much like a trip to the Statue of Liberty and spending New Year’s Eve in Times Square, once is enough. I froze my ass off. A pal of mine liberated about a dozen tiny bottles of Harvey’s Bristol Cream from a British Airways flight and brought them in a paper bag. Drinking amongst all those happy families and little children felt kind of creepy, but drink we did.

B. was created, Frankenstein’s monster-style, from the leftover balloons used in children’s parties at the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. Forbidden from playing with other children because of his jagged teeth and crazy-quilt stitching, B. retreated to a basement lair, where he obsesses over Albert Lamorisse’s film “The Red Balloon” and dreams that he, too, will be able to fly someday.

Surprisingly, NONE of these new balloons exist to promote a product. I guess you can classify them solely as artistic endeavors. It’s enough to give you hope. Here’s how Mr. Murakami dressed last year to march alongside Kaikai and Kiki. I’m hoping that Mr. Burton dons an appropriate outfit to march alongside B. Boy.

We send The Daughter to CCD. For the uninitiated, CCD is the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine. Sounds ominous, doesn’t it? It is. It’s where you send your kids if you’re Catholic but don’t attend a parochial school. It’s religion class. I attended when I was a kid and I turned out okay. (Didn’t I?)

I think it’s good that Mrs. Wife takes them to church and gives them a spiritual foundation. Later on, when they get older, they can make up their own minds as to whether they want to continue to embrace church teachings or do as I did and reject Catholicism. I predict that they will become, what I refer to as, Chinese menu Catholics. About 90% of Catholics are Chinese menu Catholics. My mom was one. You pick and choose which aspects of church doctrine you are comfortable with, but reject the silly stuff. Most Catholics don’t feel that birth control is a sin. Divorcees stand in line for communion. For many years, you weren’t supposed to eat meat on Friday, but so many people ignored that one that *presto!* it’s no longer a sin. I believe that most Catholics would love to see women enter the priesthood. I would.

I was surprised to discover that The Daughter’s CCD class was taught by a student from the local Catholic high school. I was always taught by either nuns or parents. I think my mom even taught classes for a while. It seemed to me that leaving some poor high school girl to the tender mercies of a room full of 9-year olds was unfair but, apparently, she’s a whiz with kids and it works.

You know what happens when there’s a substitute teacher, right? Bedlam! Except that this evening, it wasn’t the students who rioted. Their usual beloved teacher was out sick so she was replaced by two mean girls from the Catholic high school. They proceeded to tear the class apart. They made fun of one kid’s name and told some poor girl she was a nerd. They immediately spotted the class hellion, a kindred spirit, and bonded with him. He performed a profanity-laced rap song which the girls recorded on their phones. It’s probably up on YouTube right now. It’s the first time The Daughter heard the word “fuck” so now THAT cat’s out of the bag. After his rapping, he told my daughter’s friend that he was going to “…put my foot up your ass.” Nine years old! It was about as far away from the teachings of Mathew, Mark, Luke and John as you can get.

The next morning, Mrs. Wife wrote a fantastic, scathing letter to the director of the church and CCD program. Apparently, they were deluged with similar letters. As Daughter was relaying this, I got angrier and angrier. I mean, scary angry. Don’t make me elaborate. This sort of thing is going to happen with increasing frequency as she gets older. I’m worried about my self control. Or lack thereof. I’m not a tough guy. I’m liable to get my ass kicked pretty good.