The Most Important Lesson I Learned This Christmas

Give the gift you would most like to have for the Yankee Swap. That way, when you get stuck with it at the end, you won’t be so disappointed.

If You Forgot to Get Holiday Gifts for Your Favorite Authors...

Actually, the coolest gift I got this Christmas was from my brother, a set of red-wine glasses. No, not red-wine-colored glasses that distort everything you see so that you think you’re drunk. But rather wine goblets, stemware, specifically designed for drinking red wine out of them. It was exactly what I wanted!

I’m not a wine snob. Really. I’m only a wannabe wine snob.

Now, you might not think that it matters what you drink red wine out of. After all a glass is a glass, right? Anything more is just for decoration. But you would be incorrect. You might think that those beautiful white wine glasses that a friend gave me years ago, they’d be just as useful to drink red wine out of. But that wouldn’t be quite right. You might think that the generic cheapo wine glass that I’ve been drinking my red wine out of, the only one left that hasn’t been knocked off the counter and shattered into a million pieces, that I wouldn’t be able to tell one bit of difference whether I used that old glass or one of these new goblets. But if you were to see a good wine poured into this crystal chalice, if you were to inhale as its delicate walls funneled the bouquet toward your longing olfactory organs, if you…

I’m sorry. I forgot where I was going with that.