How to Get your Boots Reheeled for the Holidays: 20 Easy Steps!

Step 1: Realize you are spending part of holidays in frozen tundra that is the Great Lakes region of United States. Step 2: Realize only suitable pair of footwear you own for holidays in North (that are not your puffy Keens which also double as spaceboots) are  pair of black heeled knee-highs, the heels of which are caked in mud and worn down to metal studs.

Step 3: Accept fact that must brave Sixth Ring of Dante's Inferno, aka The Mall A Week Before Christmas in order to drop off boots at cobbler.

Step 4: Tote Youngest Child to Mall Hell a Week Before Christmas where every temptation and glittering toy is on his eye-level display for greedily grubbily desiring.

Step 5: Concede as never have before in history to renting one of those Mall Carriages with the Car in Front for low low price of $5 for 25 minutes in order to pacify youngest child and not lose in crowd that is Mall Hall a Week before Christmas.

Step 5: Graciously deposit dilapidated boots with Korean cobbler. Speak in only known Korean pleasantries.

Step 6: Realize must return to Mall Hell the next day (T=6 days until Christmas) .

Step 7: Make beeline to Barnes and Noble while child still pacified by Most Expensive Plastic Car Rental in History.

Step 8: Read half a book in Barnes and Noble to younger child until realize only have 20 minutes to pick up older child from school.

Step 9: Drive like dickens back to return Plastic Car, trying not to contract hepatitis, scurvy, other communicable diseases from rental that smells and feels of partially hydrogenated oils fermenting on handlebars since 1994.

Step 10: Watch as child begs to be let out of Plastic Car like it is the Guantanamo Bay of child transportation vehicles.

Step 11: Return plastic rental.

Step 12: Return to Mall Hell next day to pick up boots, this time saddled with both children.

Step 13: Forewarn children this is a very brief one-errand trip that will not, by any means, include a stop at any play structure.

Step 14: Enter Sears; note reaction of children as though have just entered whimsically wonderland palace of wintry enchantment. oooohhhh ahhhhhh!

Step 15: Claim boots which are perfectly rehabilitated to former heeled age of innocence.

Step 16: Proceed to Mall Hall exit. Refuse to cave to indoor play structure's temptation. Note younger child pulling at seat of pants.

Step 17: Assume wrongly that a restroom can be found en route to exit.

Step 18: Find escalator to floor 1, find restroom. Cheat death by allowing youngest child to wear Crocs on escalator.

Step 19: Blink and suddenly younger child has managed not to pull down pants fully as seated on comode; gamely soaks underwear and pants with urine.

Step 20: Take escalator to second floor, pronounce fact that have both children, purse, and newly heeled boots a Christmas miracle.

New Laws in Kendraspondence, USA

Howdy, all. As the mayor of Kendraspondence, USA, I'm proud of our city council for enacting the following laws. Please take note of any tax consequences as even without prior offense, we will be taxing indiscriminately.

I. Under no circumstances may any citizen or visitor of the municipality begin a sentence, verbal or written, with "Him and I/Her and I/Me and Him/Me and Her." Penalty will be total banishment for 14 days or until proper use of pronouns reinstated.

II. Under no circumstances may any citizen or visitor of the municipality use "I" as an indirect object, such as "It was important to him and I." Penalty will be standing with one's nose in a corner for 45 minutes, or until proper use of direct/indirect objects reinstated.

III. Citizenry who find out the sex of their baby and announce the name of the baby before the baby is born to the world will be given their Christmas presents without any wrapping paper since they are incapable of enjoying surprises. And the mayor will laugh haughtily, as if that were even a punishable crime.

IV. Patrons of restaurants who take calls or text on their cellphones in lieu of showing courtesy to waitstaff will be ejected from their seats and catapulted into a bin of bellybutton lint.

V. Parking in a handicapped spot anywhere in the municipality when no physical handicap restricts a driver in any way will be punishable with a fine of 43,000 hours of community service, assisting handicapped drivers/passengers enter and exit their vehicles in the pouring rain.

We shall keep the new legislative measures to five for the present. In the meantime, we will continue to celebrate weekly hammock days and eat as many antioxidants as our diets and budgets will allow.

Vows not seen in the NYT

The only way to read the Sunday NYT is to dart right for the Sunday Styles section. Otherwise you are dead inside or you are illiterate, or possibly both. Maybe you take a quick scan of whether or not you know anyone in the "Vows" pages. (I never do.)(I was born in the Midwest.)(I think these parenthetical facts are related.) Maybe you snicker at the brazen journalist who capped off the profile on one couple-to-be-wed, "The groom's previous two marriages ended in divorce." What would the hashtag for that one be? #bestwishes #threesacharm These little profiles are always so unapologetically namedroppy and vomitus. Yet they are also a rare celebration of union, against the wails of the thousands who have lost loved ones in the Phillippines this week, against the din of celebrity break-ups of the hour.

But what if they told the real story, gave us the real scoop. Here's how ours would read:

Kendra Stanton, the daughter of a redheaded mother and a silver-haired father, was married on Sunday to John Lee, the son of Mija and Jae. None of the parents have amassed great fortunes due to their Ivy league educations, though if filing taxes on time made one a rock star, these people would be a bunch of Mick Jaggers. In fairness, Kendra's father is a lawyer but prefers to reference his glory days working the steampress at Schoolbells school uniform suppliers, when he was 18.

Ms. Stanton, 24, is a serial jobhopper who is not living up to her potential and is accruing credit card debt rapidly, probably because she keeps reinvesting her profits from her part-time retail job into her wardrobe since her full-time job working with at-risk youth is making her depressed about the state of humanity. It's better than eating her feelings, because, hello, wedding dress fitting in two days! She graduated magna cum laude from a small liberal arts college on a hill that is highly obscure. She no longer remembers her major. Her parents are no longer married. They have never taken her to Europe. She doesn't know it yet but she will not be taken off the waitlist at her top law school, so she won't go after all.

Mr. Lee, 26, is an anomaly: a male, Canadian-born Korean social worker who likes fashion, frisbee and football and loves Jesus. He might actually be the only one. Like, on earth. He earned his MSW from a college that happens to be all-women for undergraduate, which was not as much of a problem as one would imagine. In his own undergraduate years, he was not the most stunning student. He did swim all four years and has the wristwatch to prove it. His parents own a dental lab, which is a useful thing for a variety of reasons, particularly for making free mouthguards for future daughters-in-law who develop TMJ for unknown reasons.