Is anyone else getting completely obliterated by the stress of the holiday season? I just looked at my bank account and I'm quaking in my boots. How is it that I've made certain to remain within my gift-giving budget and yet I'm dead broke? I think next year I'm just going to bake everyone cookies and send them via Fed-Ex so that I can stay home and enjoy the holidays by myself, like a proper Scrooge . Anyway. The world doesn't stop for my stress, and you know what? That's a good thing. The hol…

Is everyone thinking the same thing?

Happy Hanukkah!

Giving people gifts can be one of the more challenging aspects of the holiday season. Especially when you're dating someone who isn't straightforward about the presents they would actually like to receive. The people in my life who I struggle to buy gifts for are my parents and my boyfriend. My parents simply have everything they could ever want and have abandoned the quirky interests of their past (like Mexican dioramas) for a more quaint and pastoral lifestyle in their new home of Vermont. My…

'Happy New Years' is just on the tip of our tongue at this point.

Greetings, Scrooges, Grinches, and the like. To celebrate the holidays, the explosively festive YBOC Series Finale focuses on how Christmas movies are basically all just capitalist propaganda. To send him off, Dr. Jordan Breeding is visited by a few friends.

“This mushroom, again considered a gift by the Koryak people, grows at the base of pine trees. What do you put under pine trees on Christmas? Gifts!”

“We had to multiply the gingerbread recipe by 12 just for the first day of the build.”

Maybe the Grinch would have been nicer if all the Who's in Whoville weren't singing about how much of a jerk he is?

"Put some mistletoe on my butt and kiss it!"

Growing up my foodie Dad had a huge section of his bookcase that was dedicated to cookbooks. I'd be able to rifle through books about indigenous Colombian cuisine, classic French cookbooks, and gorgeously photographed tomes of food from the Levant. I did notice, however, that he rarely, if ever, used these books. It turns out my parents needed that section not because my dad loves cookbooks, but because people love giving them to him. I wonder what would happen if they bothered to ask what he w…

Hang 'em up

“I'm gonna offer a free service to all of these home goods stores—I will go through your Chanukkah section and find your Christmas stuff and take it out. I will help you with this!”

Now that the gluttony and ritual of Thanksgiving have come and gone, 'tis finally the season for indulging in Hallmark Christmas/holiday movies. Now, I understand that many of you may consider the “films” (if you can call them that) a low form of entertainment. But gosh darn it, they are predictable! There are not many tropes that compare when it comes to formulaicity, a

You've trained all year for this moment.

Every year, without fail, it happens. Sometimes it's after Halloween , but the phenomenon follows Thanksgiving more predictably. We're not talking about Black Friday or Cyber Monday and we're not talking about the weight we gain from Halloween candy or our Thanksgiving feasts and leftovers. We're talking about the sudden burst of radio and streaming air time devoted to Mariah Carey's “All I Want For Christmas is You.”