My wife Tanya and I went to Wal-Mart on Sunday to buy groceries. If you looked in our refrigerator or the cupboards at the house, you would've thought you'd stumbled across a family of vegans -- vegans on diets, no less. It was really, really time to buy groceries.
I love Wal-Mart; Tanya, not so much. As we maneuvered the grocery cart up and down the aisles, following the grocery list almost to the letter, Taya asked me, seemingly out of the blue, "What do you want for Christmas?"
It was 74 degrees outside and Christmas was the last thing on my mind; I'm still recovering from Halloween. As I paused to think of an answer, I realized why Tanya had thrown out the question: Christmas music was being played ever so subtly on the store's P.A. system. It's too early to be thinking of Christmas, I thought, until I remembered that the first week of November has come and gone and December is bearing down on us like a runaway freight train.
My normal answer for Christmas gifts is "books and music," but since I got an MP3 player last year and loaded more than 2,000 songs onto it, music is probably out of equation this year.
Actually, we didn't really think we'd be having this question-and-answer session at all, because, based on our oncologist's prognosis, I was lucky to have lived past last Christmas.
Tanya loves Christmas. But she prefers to give rather than receive, so I'd better get a list started because Christmas is going to be here before long. No pressure.