Today’s guest post comes from Beth-Ann.

When my son was in kindergarten he insisted that we needed a lighted lawn decoration for Christmas. He lobbied incessantly and eventually overcame my aesthetic, traditional, and practical objections to planting lighted extruded plastic in front of our house to mark the nativity of the Lord.

On Thanksgiving weekend with coupon in hand we headed off to the late, great Frank’s Nursery and Crafts. The purchase required a lot of negotiation. My son’s vision was much gaudier and even at half price more expensive than mine. Finally we agreed that a hard-bodied light up Santa with a sack would join our family. We took him home, put him on the front steps of our townhouse, and at dusk ran his cord inside and turned him on. Clearly we were the spirit of commercial Christmas incarnate.

My neighbor still recounts with horror that she heard a noise that night and saw Santa rolling around our driveway. It had not occurred to me that all those other light-up Santas, Frostys, and Holy Families with and without animals had been anchored down.

After some research I put together some bungee cords and attached Santa to the porch railing. My son was concerned that little children would be worried that Santa wouldn’t come to visit them since he was tied to our porch.

The oft told tale of my pre-school aged brother referring to St Nicholas’ helper as The Ho-Ho man led us to eventually refer to our light up figure as The Ho as in “Did you remember to plug in the Ho?” During junior high when snarkiness reigned we began to refer to him as Santa in bondage. For a while he had a penguin companion, but The Guin proved not to be as bright as The Ho and was forced into retirement when his light bulb no longer lit.

It won’t surprise you that since my son has left home and The Ho is in my sole custody I am devoted to him. He is tied up every December 1st and I make sure the Ho is aglow most evenings. He is terribly unfashionable and approaching retro at this point and I have to admit we have indeed bonded.

What holiday tradition were you initially reluctant to accept, yet now embrace?

Today’s guest post comes from Jim in Clark’s Grove.

I admire Scott and Helen Nearing, who wrote about their self-reliant life style in a book called “Living the Good Life”. They built their own house and raised most of their own food. Like them, I raise some of my food, but unlike the Nearings, I didn’t build my home. And although I try to do most my own repairs, most of these projects do not go smoothly.

A recent effort at taking care of a broken light fixture is a good example of what can happen. One of the three fluorescent bulbs in a light fixture would not stay on. I tried to solve this problem by replacing the flickering bulb, and the new bulb stayed lit for a while and then the problem returned – an indication that the fault was in the fixture itself. The next step was to turn the light off and look for loose wires. I knew some of the wires might be loose because I am the person who installed this light in the first place. But after a long struggle, the bulb still would not stay on. I thought I might be dealing with a faulty ballast so I returned to the store where I bought the light to get a replacement. The clerk said he was sure that he was selling me the right part.

Taking the fixture apart the second time became more complicated because now none of bulbs would light up and I couldn’t tell if the switch was in the off or on position. I ended up making many trips to the basement to find the correct circuit breaker, and after finally re-taking thing apart I discovered that the replacement ballast did not look at all like the one in the original light. In short, it looked like I would need to cut a very large number of wires and might have a lot of trouble getting them properly reconnected.

I decided right then that I am much better at installing new things than I am at repairing old ones.

The new light looks great, and I’m feeling surprisingly self-reliant, though not in the sense the Nearings intended. I relied on myself to declare defeat when the repair job became too complicated, and I relied on myself to decide to go out and get a new fixture.

Many of my other attempts at doing my own repairs have resembled this less than smooth effort. I suspect the Nearings would not have been so quick to buy a new product to fix an old problem. They were intent on insulating their lives from the culture of consumption, and I was intent on not spending the rest of my life struggling with this one stubborn device.

What happens when you do your own repairs?

Today’s guest blog comes from Joanne in Big Lake.

Like peanut butter and jelly, cookies and milk, beer and peanuts – football and holidays seem to go together. And sometimes, it’s a good thing.

I grew up in Green Bay, WI during the Lombardi era of football. Bart Starr, Ray Nitzchke and Paul Hornung were my heroes and the Packers ruled the field with a passing and running game that few teams could equal at that time. With little else to do in Green Bay (besides drink beer), the Packers gave the town a common pride and heritage. They also gave a good reason to be with family or a way to start conversation.

Being terribly shy and awkward in high school, I figured if I was good in sports and could talk intelligently about football, that boys might pay attention to me. While that may not have panned out; at least I had fun, enjoyed being in sports and was a fairly good athlete.

Now sports are a starting point for conversation and feeling together. My oldest son may not share the details of his life with me, but we cheer on the Packers together, I learn about his Fantasy Football team, trash talk the lame Vikings and exchange opinions of other teams. My two younger boys are in karate with me; so we share our love of martial arts weapons, how to improve our katas/forms and practice sparring with each other During karate tournaments we watch, analyze and pick apart competitors; marvel at the top performers’ skill and are bedazzled by fancy weapons for sale.

At family gatherings for the holidays, there’s usually a TV on with a game playing.

Understand, I love my family dearly, but I don’t see them that often. After exchanging the latest news of jobs, kids, injuries, illnesses and household projects – there’s not much else to talk about sometimes. But sporting events provide a special bonding experience that helps lay the groundwork for more meaningful conversation. Booze helps, too. My siblings aren’t alcoholics by any means, but they do enjoy wine, beer and other spirits – far more than I do.

Don’t get me wrong – I am not enamored of sports, the overpaid athletes or the overriding need to win. There’s far too much emphasis on sports in schools and playgrounds. I don’t read the sports pages or keep up with any team – well, maybe the Packers since they’ve got a great season so far. But the special bonding of rooting for the home team, cheering a great play, booing a bad call or admiring the athletic feats of strength and skill make holiday gatherings more fun. Maybe not every time or with every family, but it certainly works a lot of the time.

Sports on TV smooth over childhood sibling rivalries, the favored child stories, who tattled on whom, “I couldn’t believe you dated him” and other mild dysfunctions of growing up in a typical, loving family. I realize this group of baboons is not highly interested in sports – but you probably have to deal with friends or relatives – and perhaps feign interest in sports with those who are caught up in that web of competition and outrageous media coverage.

Has a sports event help you connect with others? What other things belong together?

Today’s guest post is by Steve.

I got my first “real” job when I turned 16. My dad, a top executive at his factory, didn’t want to be accused of nepotism, so he arranged for me to work in an allied business that he never dealt with. The business where I worked was a silk screen processing plant.

Our work was to use squeegees, screens and paints to emblazon various products—t-shirts, sweatshirts, pennants, caps—with college logos or mascots. After we had screened a design on a shirt or whatever, that object would be covered with wet paint. We would then send it down a long conveyer belt under a bank of heat lamps. All those lamps made the shop as hot as a steel mill. There was a concern at the time that sweating too much would deprive our bodies of precious salts, so we spent a lot of time around the cooler belting down water and eating fistfuls of salt tablets. Workers occasionally fainted, dropping gracefully to the floor by their work stations.

I remember when Gina went down. Gina was a skinny Italian girl with a hooked nose and saucy mouth. She looked like a pocket rocket version of Cher. On the day I started working in Silk Screen Processing my dad pointed out Gina, saying, “Keep your distance from that Dago girl. She’s already had one kid out of wedlock.” His warning, of course, just inflamed my interest. Our production manager—an excitable man—happened to be nearby when Gina swooned and hit the floor. Gene knelt over Gina, babbling wildly about how she needed air. Then he suddenly noticed that his hands were up under Gina’s blouse, unhooking her bra. With a scream, he lurched to his feet and fled the building. That incident became just one more reason the workers held him in contempt.

A raw ink design on a shirt looks cheap, so most of our sweatshirts had ink designs that were flocked to make the design fuzzy and elegant. Flock is a curious product, sort of like thousands of tiny short hairs, and in your hand it feels like a handful of dust. After we had dumped several cups of flock on the wet paint of a sweatshirt, the shirt was filthy because of the excess flock. All those tiny hairs settled deep into pores in the shirt and refused to leave.

That’s where I came in. My dad designed a Rube Goldberg machine that was basically two Hoover vacuums, one upright and one upside down. These two vacuums met face-to-face with perhaps three quarters an inch of space between them. My job was to fold a sweatshirt, hold it tightly and then run it back and forth between the two roaring Hoovers. Two minutes of sweeping a shirt between the Hoovers would clean it up almost like new. I’d throw the clean shirt in a big bin and reach for the next flocky shirt. I could never get ahead. The faster I cleaned the shirts, the more dirty ones they would stack by my machine.

It was unpleasant. The Hoovers roared at such a volume that I could not listen to music or converse with the workers around me. The machines were hot, plus the effort required to drag the shirts back and forth between the whirling beaters was exhausting. Sheets of sweat ran off my chest and back as I worked. But the greatest sacrifice involved with working on those Hoovers was boredom and isolation. I couldn’t say a word to anyone all day.

And you know what happens when you run a Hoover over a loose rug: the beaters eat the fabric, the fabric gets wrapped around the belt, and the machine seizes with a sick whoop that often means the belt is broken. And if the fabric in question is a white sweatshirt, as most of ours were, now it would be ruined with black rubber skid marks. To keep shirts from getting sucked into the Hoovers, I had to pull and stretch them to keep the fabric taut. We only screened enough sweatshirts to fulfill each order, so if I spoiled a shirt or two we would be forced to set up an emergency run of that design to replace the ruined ones. Guess how popular that made me with the workers who had to replace shirts I had spoiled with my Hoovers?

There was a final twist. Because I was “the boss’s son,” I was terrified of being seen as a slacker. Typically for me, I over-compensated by attacking my job with a ferocious effort, suffering in silence while forcing myself to smile with the fixed grin of a corpse. The bosses couldn’t find anyone else who would do that job. After a day or two on the Hoovers, anyone with half a brain quit. Not me. I got to suck flock off sweatshirts all summer long for three summers in a row. At the end of that time, shaking with rage, I asked the production manager what I had done to cause him to keep me on those damned machines for three years. “You were fast and you were always smiling,” he said, “I wanted to keep you happy.”

The only good that came of all of this was my determination to get a college education. I wasn’t sure I was smart enough to do college work. Nobody in my family had ever been to college, and I had hardly distinguished myself as a scholar in high school. But having sampled the delights of factory work, I was ready for a change. After sucking flock off sweatshirts for three years, inorganic chemistry didn’t seem so formidable.

What is the worst job you ever had?