LRC pick
A present I’ll never forget
The answer to the distortion of Christmas by retailers and advertisers using social pressure to guilt you out of your money. Arigato gozaimasu, Mike Rogers.

And, lest we forget:

My mother raised three sons and kept home all the while picking up sewing jobs whenever she could. She didn't come from a wealthy family and even if she had, it wouldn't have mattered: Her family in Japan disowned her for marrying an American. They couldn't believe that she would marry someone from a country that had so mercilessly bombed their homes. Some of my mother's relatives didn't speak to my mom again for almost 35 years.

More on Christmas from Fr Joseph Huneycutt:

I hate the shopping. I hate the frivolous debt. I hate supporting Communist China.

And from Terry Mattingly via Drake Adams:

Modern suburbs do not have a church in a public square at the center of town. Most don't have a public square at all and the true community center is the shopping mall.

Another reason besides nasty nouveau middle-class people (who’ve got some of the vices of the upper classes and few of the virtues) why I don’t like suburbia (I live in an Edwardian house in a place that’s really an extension of the city just across the border) and like places like York, England and St Clair and Frackville, Pennsylvania.