Just the Paper Please!

I’m not an overly indulgent person, but there are certain events during the course of a day that if they don’t happen, I become awfully cranky.

For example, I’m a ridiculously early riser – even on the weekends if I get up past 6:30 a.m., I’ve overslept in my mind. So whenever everybody else in Chez Carlino hits the snooze alarm until at least 9, I use that time to enjoy my freshly ground cup of dark roast black coffee with my newspapers.

Alone.

My sunrise habits have me convinced that in a previous life I was either a farmer or an infantryman.

Ditto at 6:30 pm, when, after completing the obligatory prep work for dinner, I sit down to an oversized glass of Sauvignon Blanc, with a virtual “Do Not Disturb” sign hanging over my head. My offspring know not to bother me for a minimum of 30 minutes. If I've had a less-than-stellar day at work, that span can easily stretch to an hour.

But with the holidays encroaching, both sessions have left me frustrated. 

Once the major retailers put the Halloween decorations in storage until 2015, they immediately roll out the life-size Santas and candy cane poles about the first week in November and painfully remind us there’s just seven weekends until Christmas.

It’s bad enough that big box stores open their doors for Black Friday the evening before on Thanksgiving, forcing employees to forego the celebration with their families, but that my morning and evening ritual of newspaper reading now requires a forklift to carry the publications to the couch due to the 50-plus pages of circulars stuffed in the center like an oversized butterball.

And anyone who has undergone this annual ritual knows that once you unfold the paper, the ads don’t behave and remain in their place, they simply spill out on the floor like autumn leaves on a cold day. So, in between the reams of discounts and super sales I now have to crawl under the couch to retrieve those pages with a mind of their own.

This is one of those life events you have to just accept, because it’s never going to change, in fact, it will probably get worse in the future. However there is one silver lining, when my wife was preparing to apply a coat of primer to the front door this weekend, she was searching for ground cover.

I told her I had just the thing.