The holidays are upon us. If you celebrate any over the course of the next month or so,

I want to send you my warmest wishes to you and yours. Personally, I love and celebrate Christmas.

I enjoy the feeling of this time of year.

For me, the crisp weather in the fall is just the first domino to tip over in my long line of excitement leading up to December 25th.

I'm still that person who can barely sleep on Christmas Eve because I know what the next day is.

Mind you, I've known that Santa was a story that our parents told us for almost 20 years now.

But damn it, I heard a hearty laugh and a bang on my roof one year when I was a kid.

No one has ever believed me, but I'm sticking to that story

because I sure is how believe it happened.

It's funny, I didn't realize until recently

how many Christmas legends are actually out there in the world.

For the longest time, I just ignorantly assumed

that it was jolly old St. Nick, the famous Santa Claus.

A happy rotund older man who rides a sleigh, a flying reindeer, and travels all over the globe

delivering presents to good boys and girls of the world, and then cold to the naughty ones.

The legend tells of many others, and there is a darker side to Christmas.

We have Cranpus, who is the evil demon anti-Santa, or maybe his evil twin. I'm not entirely

sure. All I know is that he inflicts punishment on people and he looks sort of like the devil.

Or a wild beast.

It's all dependent on who is telling the story.

There's actually a thing called Cranpus Night,

and it's celebrating on December 5th,

...