Auf Deutsch

I'm channeling The Other Bill and Gisela (it's okay if you don't get it) for Es Weinachtet Sehr. That's a rough translation of 'It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas', because it is (at least in our house). 

Inside, our house went from plain very early in December to CHRISTMAS in null comma nichts. My German wife is the world's most organized person and has transformed a lazy, slothful dullard into a --okay, bad example; let's use the kids or the house or the neighborhood. She is a wizard at organization and our house is now festive with a capital F (and a neutral pH).

The letter "F" is also the beginning of a word and part of a phrase, I use a lot from starting around Thanksgiving through the end of the year (hint: it's not fa-la-la-la). I was never good at making or having friends when I was a kid, a life-long habit as it happens, so when I watch people the other eleven months of the year cross the street rather than talk to me, when they now wish me 'all the best', I know better. I'm more polite now and don't tell them where they can stick their well-wishes, mainly because they'd walk funny, but I figured you out, so don't think you fooled me.

In recent years, our family has returned to its 'original size', as our children, Patrick and Michelle, and their spouses, are themselves adults and lead their own lives far away from ours. Without discussion (forty-seven years of marriage makes a woman psychic), Sigrid will coordinate everything so that she and I will have a holly jolly Christmas that will somehow include the kids.

And in the spirit of the season, there will be a time as one of these pre-holiday afternoons surrenders the last of its light and the darkness rushes in where I stand in our yard and strain to hear a thousand singing herons and the melody of my most favorite of all seasonal songs whose words I cannot understand but whose sentiment is wonderfully clear.
-bill kenny