the ocean

I am seriously considering retiring from writing holiday greetings for several totally real and verifiable reasons.  First, I would like to spend more time with Tom Brady’s family.  He is clearly far too busy aping human emotions in those Hertz commercials, and I am an excellent role model for children, as long as you want them gay and mouthy.  Second, if Hallmark movies are any indication, there are literally dozens of holiday traditions I’m missing out on, from threatening to close a lonely widow’s family ski lodge so a hedge fund can build a soulless corporate singles resort to trading places with my overworked twin sister so I can learn the true meaning of Epiphany and she can church kiss with an attorney-turned-handyman with great hair.  Third, and most pressingly, I am running out of ideas.  After several decades of drafting heartfelt but hardly Seventh Heaven-ready holiday messages, I sometimes struggle to find fresh sentiments to express.  I am sure Hemingway felt the same way sometimes, until he remembered that he was drunk and racist and needed money.

But you are reading this message, or perhaps having it read to you by your loyal manservant Jacques, so clearly I have not retired.  I soldier on because I love the holidays and I love all of you, and in some cases rely on you to not disclose the details of what happened after I drank that bottle of Aftershock and decided to roller blade to the Hard Rock Cafe.  The holidays are when we all come together to festively decorate our Christmas trees, as though deforestation does not cost us biodiversity at a rate of 50,000 species each year, and share tasty delicacies that upon closer inspection contain many of the same chemical components as rat poison.  They give us a break from our sometimes dark reality, although of course not from reality television, which is actively in production on no fewer than six series in which single mothers compete in a series of physical challenges and backstab each other over string cheese while attempting to win the heart of the Von Maur Santa Claus.

This holiday season caps another embarrassingly great year for the Schleppington household, which included trips to the U.S. Virgin Islands (beaches, driving on what is objectively the wrong side of the road), Berlin (national guilt, giant pretzels), and Prague (hourlong museum tour accidentally taken in Czech).  We also spent a lot of time at home in Old Town, defiantly not killing one another despite innumerable visits from salt of the earth repairmen with surprising amounts of unsolicited life advice to provide.  I continued working as a white collar criminal defense attorney at Dechert LLP, all the better for close-talking strangers at cocktail parties to ask me for advice about that one time they maybe submitted tons of falsified data to the FDA.  Ian continued working from home, which sounds amazing but ends up with sort of a The Shining vibe.  I wrote and performed another cabaret show, as part of my continued embrace of genres that Real America finds awkward and inexplicable, and released a book of sketch comedy, which coincidentally (hugely) you can purchase on Amazon via the links embedded below on this bog.  Because cross-promotion is the real Reason for the Season.  There’s a reason the Baby Jesus laid his head in a Farm & Fleet brand manger sponsored by Jennifer Garner for Huggies.

And just like that (minus Che Diaz), 2023 is coming to its close.  It was a fantastic year for Taylor Swift, Barbie, and Beyonce, who thus far have resisted my calls to form a crime-fighting supergroup.  The rest of us probably cannot claim to have reached similar heights, but there’s something to be said for just hanging in there.  Here’s to doing our best to remain defiantly unretired in 2024!