Home for the Hellidays

It's that time of year, boys and girls, when the air begins to smell of wood fires and snowflakes, when the chill wind smacks some rosy-red color into your cheeks, when visions of sugar plums and buttered rum shooters dance in your head. And when I make my yearly pilgrimage to the South to do penance at the altar of My Mother.

I'm the baby of my family, which becomes a more ridiculous thought every year, but this fact makes my presence at The Family Christmas (tm) as necessary as the presence of the turkey at Thanksgiving dinner--there's no holiday without it. So say My Mother and my older sister, anyway. And they say it often. Every damned year. Beginning around the 4th of July.

Coincidentally, also like the Thanksgiving turkey, I end up feeling stuffed, plucked, roasted, and picked at for about a week.

Resistance, as you might guess, is futile. It's easier not to fight, but just to let go and allow myself to be assimilated. Thankfully, my parents are total winos, so at least there will be booze. What there won't be, though, is hockey.

I know, I know. Even the booze might not get me through this.

I get on a plane tomorrow morning, well before the ass-crack of dawn, and where I'm going, there's no Center Ice, no NHL Network, no Versus, no anything. I'm going to miss the Dallas game, BOTH Chicago games, and the Columbus game before I escape. Which means that I'll be relying on other Red Wings fans, Twitter, and the internet to keep me up to date on all the latest news and injuries. I'm predicting that by early Christmas morning, I'll be found clutching my netbook to my chest, drooling and twitching as my parents lameass internet connection attempts to download grainy, bootleg game footage from some blackmarket hockey site in Kyrgyzstan.

So, the point of all this is that I'm asking--no, begging--that my readers (all 3 of you... ok, ok, all 4 of you) do me a favor and give an extra "Let's Go Red Wings!" chant for me during each of the four games I'm missing. With Zetterberg out of action even longer than I'll be, I have a feeling we'll need all the help we can get.

Thanks. And Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays. Bright Yuletide. Whatever sparks your plugs.

Love,
Red, White, & Black'n'Blue