The Weekly Shriek -- To big foam rubber fingers and kisses

I'm not a holiday person. I hate when my routines are disrupted by little munchkins who ring my doorbell and invite me to smell their feet and give them something good to eat. Of course, that's mostly because I never have anything good to eat at my house.

Thanksgiving is a sweet concept, but I don't like Turkey and dressing anymore. When you get to be my age, repetition starts to grind on your nerves and you start looking for something new and different. As some of my fellow boomers once said, "Kicks just keep getting harder to find." The fact is, no relative is going to serve anything but the traditional fixings - and try going out for tamales on Turkey Day. Stay home you say? I refer back to my earlier statement - there's never anything good to eat at my house.

The Christmas Holidays are cool - but I have a couple of complaints. First off, my birthday is Christmas Eve. Try going out to celebrate a non-Yuletide event on that day. Come two o'clock in the afternoon and all the restaurants are closing. If we do find a place to eat, the waiters and waitresses bustle around us wiping down perfectly clean tables and rattling the glassware hoping that we'll choke down our food and get out. Christmas Day is even worse. It's a frozen wasteland out there for the dinner crowd. If some kind friend doesn't take pity on us, we are doomed to stand in line with other non-cooks for won-ton soup and Kung Pao chicken, which isn't too bad given the alternative. There have been years when I've had to make do with stale peanuts and a Weight Watcher's fudgesicle.

Then, there is that football thing. I used to dig the sport. It's an easy game to understand. They run the ball. They throw the ball. They catch the ball. They kick the ball. They drop the ball. They knock each other down. They spike the ball and do a little dance. After about ten years, I realized that they were never really going to do anything else. Oh sure, once in a while a deranged fan will run out on the field naked -- but I'm not going to tune in just in case that happens. I want guarantees that I'll see something weird and unusual if I have to sit through the "neverendingfootballgame" that begins in September and lasts until mid-January.

Of course, I could make sure I'd see the drunks who paint their faces to look like dogs and the sweaty guys with kaleidoscope eyes and raincoats, waiting outside the women's bathroom, by going to the game in person. It's likely I could find something to eat at the stadium even on Christmas. However, it's too cold in December even for a treat like that. Besides, I need instant replay and that guy who draws arrows on the TV screen to keep track of who's knocking who down and who just caught the ball. That's all part of the football schtick. I don't eschew all traditions - only the ones that require my participation.

Baseball is another matter. It's nice outside when they play baseball - and all the restaurants are open - even on the Fourth of July and Labor Day. It's a simple game, too - but the players are superstitious and that adds to the overall drama of the occasion. Baseball fans are just as crazy as their football counterparts but in a more civilized way. Oh, they like the big foam rubber fingers as much as anyone else, but they are more hung up on statistics. Only folks at the pony tracks spend more time watching the numbers. Football fans only care which down it is, whether the tight end has a concussion and the overall score. Baseballers keep track of minutiae - like strikes and balls and fouls and rbis and errors and the number of times umpires get punched out in the third inning in August. At heart, these guys are a milder bunch. That's not to say they don't love a good scuffle as much as any hockey afficionado. It's just that they are more likely to want to record the number of sucker punches and eyeball gouges. That's also not to say that they don't get tanked up and misbehave once in a while. Their brand of zaniness includes big bald guys in Hawaiian shirts stealing fouls caught by little kids, out and out donnybrooks over who ended up with some veteran players Nth homerun ball and tripping up giant hotdogs marching around the field - just because.

So back to holidays. I don't mind New Years so much. Perhaps that's because I can get a good meal of my own choosing when I'm hungry. The wait staff is happy to see me again. The baseball season is a long way away. I don't HAVE to watch football since cable TV offers other options like continuous loop Law and Order reruns or a rundown of the ending year's tragedies and a listing of next year's upcoming tragedies by famous prognosticators. Who can complain about an evening that is topped off with a toast to the future and kisses?

Until next time, even kvetching can be a tradition - and fun. Enjoy what you enjoy - even if it requires a big foam rubber finger.