Caring for the Grammar Purist in Your Life

The Holidays are the hardest time of a year for a grammar purist. It can be especially exhausting to care for the grammar purist in your life as he/she copes with descriptive grammar everywhere. The omnipresence of improper punctuation is also a trigger.

For example, have you ever considered "Season's Greetings" if improperly punctuated? To a grammar purist, this is pure psychological warfare. What if the card were to say Seasons Greetings? As in a plural set of seasons are busily greeting. The grammar purist immediately embarks upon the following journey of images:

As you care for the grammar purist in your life, you may want to note common places where grammar impurity is tolerated, in order to help your purist not have a conniption fit. You may see him/her writhing in pain at the simple opening of a letter. SO many Christmas cards with, for example, "The Higgenbottom's" as return address. THE HIGGENBOTTOMS. PLURAL. NOT POSSESSIVE. You may hear him/her muttering, as he/she reads another Christmas letter ad nauseum:

"It's 'This year was special for my family and ME.' ME. I is not a direct object pronoun or even an indirect object pronoun!!!"

Understand that mumbled grammatical lessons to an unsuspecting or even an invisible audience is normal behavior for a grammar purist, particularly for this time of year. As long as the grammar purist stays in a healthy zone of the didactic, rather than the preachy or even violent, he/she should emerge from the holiday season with sanity intact.

Although difficult to avoid, you should try your best to steer your grammar purist away from shopping malls where signage with grammar impurities run rampant. Lest your grammar purist be compelled to correct every sign hastily printed:

Loving your grammar purist can be a thorny business as you endure their spastic, oftentimes inconsolable tantrums over seemingly inconsequential  matters. However, your abiding is appreciated and will reap plenty of rewards in the new  year when he/she is back to helping you edit your cover letter for that new job you're about to snag. Yay, grammar purity!

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.