What could be more exciting than getting a phone call from Santa? Not much, because Santa phone calls are one of the highlights of the Christmas season. However, if you are into the physical world of shopping, there is one thing that comes close. Black Friday is the one day of the year that you can actually get away with some of the most aggressive shopping techniques known to woman. This includes the toe stomp, the shopping cart shove, and the escalator rail slide into a crowd maneuvers that have been developed specifically with this event in mind. Here are some tips to read to gain the edge, hold the upper hand, or just survive the perils of…BLACK FRIDAY!

To conquer the beast, first, you have to understand the beast. Black Friday is the first shopping day of the year that retailers look forward to as they slash the prices of last year’s merchandise. They open early and close late. Women flood the stores in hopes of getting the best deals and will shop until midnight when the very last store closes and the event ends. Emergency rooms are flooded, fire houses are emptied, and some husbands huddle by the phone eating peanut butter sandwiches and waiting for the call that their wives are okay.

The key to survival is one of aggression and any woman who has ever participated can tell you that a good offense is a great defense. One way to get what you want is to take one of the many training course offered before the sale to show women how to play the game like a man. There are elbow crushes to the ribs, leg trips, and judo body throws being honed as early as August in anticipation of the upcoming sale My personal favorite is the grab the glasses off of your competitor and crush the lens under your heel, or the slide down the escalator rail and hurling your body into the crowd below, regaining your feet quicker than a wink to get a heads start.

You will rarely see a man participate in this sales event called black Friday unless he is wearing a cup and a helmet. Instead, we sit outside with the motors running, ready to make a mad dash to the next store and sale. While we wait, we practice bandaging techniques with our Black Friday emergency first-aide kits and keep our fingers crossed and Bibles open. If it is a big store or Mall, we have everything prepared including food and beverage, much like a pit stop at the Daytona 500.

While the tactics vary as to how you handle yourself, there are unwritten rules that every woman instinctively knows and abides by. These are simple rules like no guns, no knives, or no weapons period with the exception of various items already in the store. Profanity is allowed and in some cases encouraged but the most lethal weapon in a woman’s arsenal is her cunning and trickery. It is amazing to see how many women show up with pregnant bellies that were not pregnant the day before. I personally witness five women get out of a car in the parking lot and with pillows from the trunk, suddenly become pregnant before entering. When they did, a couple of dozen men, me included called or texted the information to our shopping wives complete with a description of what they were wearing.

My wife used one tactic I had never seen before and quite frankly, I believe it was improvised on the spot. Being one of the first people at the store and first in line to get in, she grabbed the employee’s arm and snatching the keys from his hand as he unlocked and opened the door, flung his body into the crowd of hysterical, sales crazed women. She promptly locked the doors behind her, greeted the locked out crown with two good morning fingers, one from the middle of each hand, and proceeded to go shop with a twenty-minute head start before someone else figured out what had happened and located the manager with another set of keys. The original door-opening employee stayed cowering under a car long after the doors were reopened. I have never seen him there since.

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Christmas is the time of year that brings families together. Many people are traveling, desperately trying to get home or to their families in time for Christmas. With all of this going on, there is another tradition that we have started. Unlike the family traditions like the writing of the Santa letter or opening the letter from Santa, where the whole family comes together for the event, this tradition is a little more selfish than that. On Christmas Eve, my wife and I stay at home and do nothing. I know that does not sound like much of a tradition but it important to us.

It took several years but most of our family has finally caught on to the idea. With our children grown with children of their own, it is the perfect chance for us to be alone on Christmas Eve and enjoy each other’s company. They know that we will join them before this day and after. They can count on us to visit with our grandbabies and bring our gifts. We spend time with them and always have a huge meal on Christmas day. Christmas Eve, however, is our own.

It starts with the house being completely dark save for the candles that we place in the rooms that we will use. We burn two or three candles in the kitchen, two in the bathroom, and twenty or more in the living room. Candles have a way of setting so many different moods. They can be scary at Halloween, romantic on Valentines day, (night) and useful on the Fourth of July, but on Christmas Eve, they are just joyful and yet soulful at the same time. It is difficult to explain but it makes our house feels like a home on that one special night of every year.

With the house warmly lit by the multi-colored and multi-fragranced candles, we also light pine or Christmas scented oils and incense. The smell of Christmas by candlelight makes you feel warm inside. It is almost like knowing that you are loved but not knowing by whom. Now it is time to whip up some hot chocolate and settle in front of the fireplace.

We have found that on Christmas Eve, we prefer a low, slow burning fire as opposed to a roaring fire. It is nice to have a roaring fire during those cold days and nights when it is needed but on Christmas Eve, a small slow one is best. On the CD player, we will set up the old classic Christmas albums that we grew up with as children. The crooners of old really know how to put you into the spirit and the instrumentals are just as cozy.

Sometimes we will talk quietly about the Christmases of old, but, most of the time we just sit there in the glow of the candles and firelight and just are together. Each of us lost in our own thoughts about what Christmas means to us and how much we love sharing it with each other. When two people have been together long enough, they learn how to enjoy each other without a lot of words. This is one Christmas tradition that I will always cherish. If I am left here alone, I will still carry on this tradition and I know that she will be here with me. If she should still be here when I am gone, I know that she will also be right here on Christmas Eve and I will be here with her, in her heart, keeping her warm without saying a word.

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Being Santa is one of the most difficult jobs in the world. If it was not bad enough that he builds millions of toys and then travels around the world in one night to deliver them, he also has many other duties that we do not know about. There are decisions that have to be make that could change people’s lives. The naughty and nice list alone is such a daunting task that we could not do it ourselves. In fact, it would take 200 ordinary people working 24 hours a day every day for a year to go through the list once and even then, Santa would have to do it again. A single day I the life of Santa would wear a person out so completely that they would be in bed for a week. Here are five things that no one knew about Santa Clause. (Until now)

Santa Clause is a great explorer. He has traveled around the world many times during the Christmas off-season in disguise. He has also traveled under the world. Santa Clause discovered a great cave beneath our world that has thousands of miles of tunnels. He chose to live at the North Pole because of one of these tunnels. You see, he discovered that directly under the North Pole there is a place where time stands still because this is where the polar opposites meet. If you hold two magnets close to each other, they repel each other. It is impossible to put two strong magnets together. Santa built a room around the spot where the earth’s magnetic forces meet. Time does not move inside this room. This is where Santa checks the naughty and nice lists.

Santa Clause has the largest collection of books in the world. He has an underground library where he goes to read and loves to collect books from all over the world. He has the highest I.Q. of anyone on the planet. Santa can read faster than anyone in the world and has read an entire set of encyclopedia in less than an hour.

Santa Clause does not sleep. He has never had to sleep. There is something about his metabolism that keeps him from getting tired. He is the only person in the whole world who does not need sleep. Sometimes though, he will take a nap just so he can dream. He likes to dream and always dreams that he is normal, just like everyone else. It is his favorite dream.

Everyone knows that Santa Clause can speak every language in the world but very few people realize that he can speak animal language as well. He knows every language on the planet, which includes animals. He can even speak to trees. The problem, he says, is that trees speak very slowly and they have a lot to say. You have to be patient when you speak to them. His favorite languages are reindeer and chipmunk. He really enjoys bird talk because it is the most difficult. You have to sing it and there are thousands of dialects of it.

Everyone knows that Santa Clause has magic. What most people do not understand is the depth of his magic. While he has never used all of his powers, he has something called telekinesis, which allows him to move things with his mind. He is also strongly empathic, and can read most people’s mind. He loves to talk on the telephone. Santa phone calls are his favorite things to do. If you get phone calls from Santa, you can ask him some of this. He is happy to share with children!

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