Kris Blackmore LDBC-elfie

I’m gonna level with you, LDBCers: heartless as I may appear to be, I’m actually a big, giant softie with gooey insides. Sort of a molten-chocolate cake, if you will—if said dessert had a crust of hardened steel and a core consisting of my vital organs floating in a living aspic of empathy, remorse, blood, and weeping. (Hey, nobody told you to eat while reading this thing.)

Thus, when ‎Heather Cvitkovic McGregor shared this Black Friday tale punctuated by her broken-hearted six-year-old, I swear to you, I misted up a bit. I mean, look: I don’t do this thing to make little girls cry. And I think what really gets to me is the way the kid thinks not of herself, but of her family unit suffering together. I’m not kidding, people: it’s lump-in-the-throat time.

Let me set the scene. Black Friday. A second Thanksgiving dinner spent with my family. My sweet children and innocent nieces and nephew are idyllically playing. Christmas music hums in the background. Bellies full, my sister and I laugh as we do the dishes. And then my precious six-year-old comes to me with giant tears in her eyes. “Mumma, we lost.” I look at her quizzically. And then I hear it. And a string of obscenities come pouring out of my mouth. What?!?! Who put this station on? Who jeopardized mine and my children’s chances of making it through the holiday season? Why?!?! So I didn’t make it an entire 24 hours. And it took me two days to recover from the loss. It will take my nieces and nephew a lifetime to recover from my foul mouth. I did not take a picture. I could not even tell you what version it was. I can only tell you I lost—and not at all graciously. Damn you, Drummer Boy. Maybe next year!

See? How can I go on after that? But then I remember that you’re all counting on me to keep making the donuts, so I relegate that grieving child to the statistical scrapheap. I man up and move on. I volunteered for this, after all. I’m just saying I’m not a monster, okay? That would be The Boy. Not me.

Anyway, as of this posting, we’ve got 152 casualties reported on the official form. That’s twice what we had as of this date last year. It like somebody invited us to go swimming with sharks and then dumped chum in the water. Only it’s not toothy fish we need to worry about it, it’s holiday-themed evil incarnate. You get the picture.

A couple fun things to note, though: we got a great write-up from The A.V. Club the other day. And I did my yearly thing with our pals at Good Day Sacramento this morning:

Also, here’s LDBCer Kara Lang on family tradition. And if this doesn’t uncork your holiday sentiment, I doubt there’s anything else we can do to help you, to be perfectly honest.

So there’s that. Plus we’ve got a whole host of LDBC-elfies turned in already (gallery below). If you’ve gotta go out, might as well go in style and send a snapshot of the tragedy our way. And we have our First Fallen, too, whose name is the battle cry that gives us strength to make it through LDBC 2017, the valorous Joyce Dudley Hindman.

Ever vigilant, people. For Joyce!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.