Dear Santa,

We know it’s late and we’re sorry about that.  We know you’ve been busy yourself getting all the things put together for your big ride coming up next week.  How do you do it year after year?  We’d be exhausted and retired by now.  Anyway, we have a couple of last minute gift requests we’d like to see if you could help with.

We’d like for those televised football games, which are all of them, that consist of four 15 minute quarters to take less than 3 & ½ hours of television time.  That way when we want to watch something on Sunday night we don’t have to guess when our shows are going to start or where they are in the program if we happen across one that’s already on.  It’s getting so bad that the only thing you can count on starting on time is the Sunday night football game.  But who wants to stay up until midnight the day before you have to go to work?  We always have to go to work the next day.

We’d like a ream of parking instruction pamphlets that we can put on the windshields of cars driven by people who still don’t get what the lines drawn in the parking lots are for.  You probably don’t have that problem as late as you come on Christmas Eve but it’s getting ridiculous trying to find a parking space.  Actually, we can find the spaces, they’re just being taken up by these monster SUVs everyone is driving.  They all seem to think that just because they are driving a truck the size of the space shuttle that they can leave it however they put it, even if it is taking up two or sometimes three spaces.

We’d like to work for people who value us.  That might be a tall order but if you could drop something into their eggnog that makes bosses a little more personable, or at least polite, we’d really appreciate it.  And that probably goes for us when we have to take on the boss role every now and then.

We’d like fire-proof outdoor lights.  Unfortunately both of us have had outside Christmas lights that sputtered, sparked, flared, and scared the heck out of us.  We’re fine and nothing too terrible happened.  When He’s went poof he was standing in the doorway looking at it and said to himself, “Did I just see a spark,” and then out loud, “Whoa! I just saw a spark,” just as the pole lamp became a match stick.  She’s mishap happened when a strong north wind blew so hard it rubbed the cord against the house right through the insulation starting a fire at the highest point of her roof.  We don’t want to sound nasty about it but could you keep your north wind to yourself.  You probably are used to dealing with it and know how to secure stuff around your roof better than we do down here.  Anyway, “proof” versus “resistant” sure would put our minds at ease.  Probably Underwriter’s Laboratory has something to do with this too but things sometimes slip through the cracks.

We’d like a little variety in the television ads here in the lower 48.  Do you know that we sometimes have to sit through the same aging singer singing the same two lines of some made up song 10 or 12 times in a half-hour show?  Better yet, how about some commercial free television.  Probably the guys who own the commercial television stations are asking you for more advertising time but maybe you can work out a deal with everybody.  If you were able to find kids who accepted the toys from the Island of Misfits you should be able to mediate something with those misfits.

We’d like calorie free Christmas cookies.  We’ve noticed that every year you make millions of stops delivering presents and most of them have milk and cookies waiting for you.  All of the pictures we’ve ever seen show an empty plate when you leave.  Ok, those pictures are on usually on Christmas cards but if you can’t trust Hallmark, who can you trust?  You eat all those cookies all in one night and even though you are a little portly (we hate to be the ones to say that) you never get any bigger.  You must have some calorie zapper or something that lets you relish in the billions and billions of chocolate chips you consume.  How about sharing that technology?  If it works for everybody we’ll see what we can do about getting you on Shark Tank next year.  You could make a fortune with that!

And before we forget, we’d like peace on earth.  Sorry if we left the hardest one for last.

Merry Christmas,

She and He

Now, that’s what we think.  Really.  How ‘bout you?