For no good reason that I can put my finger on, it doesn't seem like Christmas is almost here.

Usually by this time of year I'm totally sick of hearing Christmas ads, hearing Christmas music, Christmas this, Christmas that and Christmas the other thing.

I don't know if it was the late fall, or whatever, but it seems like Christmas is coming late this year and I'm not ready for it yet.

The actual fact of the matter is that Christmas is less than two weeks off, and not only have I not done my Christmas shopping, I haven't even thought about it.

The heck of it is that my Christmas shopping list isn't that complicated. Over a period of thirty years my wife and I have evolved a system: with rare exceptions, she does the Christmas shopping for my daughter and the various relatives involved, while I get something for my wife. This is hard, as she has this tendency to go and buy something for herself shortly after she tells me that it would make a good Christmas gift for her.

This means that I have to come up with something out of midair. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. In fact, I would have to say that it hasn't worked very well more times than it has.

For the last few years I've had a pretty good deal worked out with her to get around this: she collects a list of books that she wants, then I sit down on www.Amazon.com and order them, paying the bill later. The only problem with that is that this year I haven't gotten that book list from her and the time to get the order in is running out fast.

Remember, I said it doesn't sound like Christmas yet? This may have something to do with my being rather tardy about dealing with such things.

Well, actually I may be making a mountain out of a molehill, but that's what happens when I can't think of anything else to write about in this column. I do actually have a couple idea of what to get her for a Christmas gift but I'm not going to say anything about it here since I know she reads this column and why should I give away my one decent idea before its time? If it turns out to be a dud, at least I get the brownie points for trying by keeping my mouth shut and not letting the cat out of the bag.

•   •   •
One thing I have noticed this holiday season is that there is a lot of discussion about "re-gifting", which, I understand it, is taking an unwanted gift that you got from someone and passing the agony on to someone else as a plausible way to get it out of your hair.

I haven't really paid much attention to discussion, but apparently the practice is becoming more common and accepted, at least in some areas.

Let's face it, we've all gotten dud gifts at one time or another, and all of a sudden you're faced with the issue of either storing it or getting rid of it. My wife and I tend to be pack rats, and there have been more than a few such items stored away since they might possibly be of use someday. I don't ever remember re-gifting something as a blind surprise gift, but there have been several times I've commented to someone, "If you want it, it's yours." And there have been some times that such gifts have provided fodder for garage sales.

But let's face it: what else do you do with an unwanted gift, especially if the appropriate sales slip isn't included so you can go back to the store and exchange it for whatever gimcrack you really wanted -- at the expense of upsetting the person that gave you the perfect gift.

I have come to believe that Christmas is a lot like entropy: you can't win, you can't break even and you can't get out of the game. Oh, well. Merry Christmas anyway; it's coming!

•   •   •
On to other business:

• In a column I wrote about a month ago, I happened to spend some time talking about my crazy November activity, which was being involved with National Novel Writing Month, a program that challenges the participants to kick out a 50,000 word novel in thirty days. It sounds like a lot if you haven't done it -- but I have, and 50,000 words was a good warmup. But there are some crazy people out there, one in particular a 19-year old girl from Philadelphia that goes by the user name of "Kateness", who sat down and got serious about her writing in November, to the tune of slightly over five hundred thousand words -- in other words, ten times the challenge. She reported rather sore fingers and wrist braces by the time she made it through the month.

Just for comparison, "War and Peace" is 556,000 words, at least according to the Gutenberg Project and the word counter in Microsoft Word.

Oh, to be 19 and crazy again.

At least she didn't write War and Peace Revisited, but in fact wrote six, count 'em, six different fantasy novels. If, as Lenin said, "Quantity had a quality all its own", I think we're going to hear from this kid sooner or later.

By the way, she wasn't alone in putting up big numbers -- there were at least a couple people in the 400,000 range, more in the 300,000 range. That's a lot of typing, any way you cut it. According to the National Novel Writing Month site, approximately 17,000 people completed the project successfully. It is kind of fun, and the sort of thing that you might want to think about next year if you're inclined in that direction. I think it's pretty cool, and like to see the efforts to have more people write and enjoy writing.

• If you held off until Sunday to hear the Hudson Community Cantata, you were out of luck when the ice storm came. If you were one of those that got iced out, you missed a pretty good show that's put on by Cyndi Wolfe and a cast of -- well, I can't say hundreds or thousands, but a bunch of people from a bunch of different churches. It's a shame that they didn't get to do the full list of performances and a shame that people missed it on Sunday. As far as I know there are no plans for a makeup date, and that's a shame. But it was a great job done with a lot of love and all involved deserve praise for their efforts.

• I'm not aware of it as well as I was when I had a kid in school, but from what talk I've heard around the new notification system at the schools is really working well when school is cancelled on account of bad weather.

Getting notifications out of such cancellations has always been a pain in the neck to everyone concerned, so it looks like technology has done something else to both simplify and complicate our lives.

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