Invented by the six-year-old son of Melissa, from Better Bag of Groceries. To the tune of “The Dreidl Song”:

Laundry, laundry, laundry, we do it every day.
Laundry, laundry, laundry, it never goes away!

No matter what winter holiday you celebrate, I’m sure we can all relate to that sentiment. Especially after a long holiday weekend!

Because eBay has thousands of them.

I don’t need a Christmas sweater — and given that there are twice as many ways to spell Hanukkah than there are nights in it, trying to find a Jewish holiday sweater on eBay would be an exercise in spellchecky madness. But I do like me some print cardigans, so I was poking about the other night to see what the offerings were. (Yes, clearly my weakness for print cardigans indicates that I still haven’t gotten that Michelle Obama fashion-worship out of my system.) And I found these:

And then I did a search under “sweaters” for “ugly” and found over three thousand hits!

Had you any idea that ugly Christmas sweaters (and socks, and vests) were such big business? I didn’t. It’s the unbridled glee in the sellers’ descriptions that I find so intoxicating:

Yes! That is one ugly sweater! Hooray! (Actually, maybe I’ve been looking at too many of these things, but this one doesn’t strike me as too bad.) And check out this vest:

The description on the vest is generally outstanding, in a kind of free-verse way (punctuation and spacing original);

Life of the party,Here it is A very Unique 1 of a Kind.Hand made
My Hubby is a XL and he can close it.There is no buttons up the.
Merry Christmas
Alittle bit of everything On this Sweater,
Thanks for Looking.Please ask questions.

Isn’t that great, in a “help i am ee cummings and am being held prisoner in a quacker factory” kind of way?

But it’s the phrase “1st prize,” I think, gives it all away, as does the word “contest” in a lot of other items. Apparently it’s been way too long since I’ve either celebrated Christmas or worked in an office (my HBS job is fairly isolated), because I’ve never heard of these “ugly Christmas attire” contests. Have you been to one? More importantly, do you have PICTURES you would like to share with all your friends on this blog???

And if you have been to one, and lost? eBay is here to help you, my friends. (But I doubt you’ll find anything on there quite as amazing as these gems.)

AND, if you want to look Christmassy but good, Peacebang at Beauty Tips for Ministers shows you the way.

… Miss Conduct’s Guide to the Holiday Season, perhaps you’d enjoy it.

(Also, may I point out — Miss Conduct’s Mind Over Manners makes a terrific holiday gift! It’s inexpensive, entertaining, and has enough psychology and humor in it that it avoids the horrible message that “OMG someone just gave me an ETIQUETTE BOOK do they think I need one??” that can be a risk with more traditional tomes.)

is online here.

Chances are, if you’re spending this holiday with friends and/or family, you’ll turn to someone with a story you’re sure they’ll love only to find, embarrassingly, that they did love it — the first two times you told it to them.

Memory can break down in a lot of ways (and here‘s a good book on it, if you’re interested). Two ways are to forget the source of information — where we learned something — and to forget the destination of information — who we told it to.

Source memory breakdown is common, and generally not a very bad thing unless 1) you’re a terrible critical thinker and an undiscriminating reader, in which case you’re going to wind up believing a lot of half-baked things*, or 2) you’re a writer and you’re trying to look something up. (I’ve been meaning to do a post for months now on something Alfred Adler used to ask his patients, except I can’t find the original source anywhere.) Socially, source-memory breakdown can be embarrassing if you’re telling someone a joke and, when you get to the punchline, they fill it in for you and say, “I told you that joke last Thanksgiving.” People tend to think that kind of faux pas is funny, though.

It’s a bit more annoying to be told the same story over and over, which is what will happen when a person has breakdown of destination memory. This is as common, yet much less studied, than breakdown of source memory. In my wholly non-scientific appraisal, marriage is a great contributor to destination-memory breakdown, as the question, “Did I tell you X, or did I only think it?” implies.

Some researchers — and this is what I’ve been getting to, if anyone’s curious — have started looking into destination-memory breakdown. Their initial finding suggests that part of the reason we forget who we told things to is because we are too focused on ourselves as the teller, and not on the listener. As a research psychologist, I have some methodological quibbles with their experiment, but as an etiquette columnist, I have to say, that’s a terrific lesson learned.

No matter where you learned it.

*Of course, if you’re not a critical thinker, good source memory can only help you so far. On my bulletin board, I have a letter from a woman to the editors of Readers’ Digest, which had published a laudatory article on J.K. Rowling. The letter-writer was angry that RD did not point out that Ms. Rowling is an acknowledged Satan worshipper, who has led some 14 million children to the Chuch of Satan through her best-selling series. The source of this information, the letter writer proudly reported, was The Onion. (And the editors’ reply, I must say, was a freaking masterpiece of tact.) Now quick, go tell a friend that story while you still remember that you read it on Robin Abrahams’s blog.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. The ConductMom is in town, and she and I will be holidaying it up for the next few days. Check back in on Friday to find out the winner of the Holiday Song Parody contest, and I’ll see you back here on Sunday. May you have a wonderful Thanksgiving and a safe & sane Black Friday.

Last year, on election day, I wrote a post about how no matter what the results turned out to be, even if your guy lost and you were angry and scared about the future, certain good things would still be true. Here are some of mine:

My husband and I will still love each other and support each others’ dreams and have bread and cheese and wine by candlelight every Friday night.

Stephen King will continue on his streak of writing some of his best, most mature fiction to date.*

Campari and soda will still be the most refreshing drink ever, even if everyone else I know finds it repellently bitter.

My book will still come out this spring.

My friends will still share ideas and jokes and trials and joys and everyday moments of grace or absurdity with me.

Eddie Izzard will still be funny.

Readers sent in their own “things the election won’t change,” too. It was a good thing to do that day. All of the things I listed were things I am grateful for. And there are still reasons to be angry and scared about the state of the world, as well as reasons to be grateful and hopeful. If you’d like to share what you’re grateful and hopeful for this holiday, I’d like to hear. Because my readers are very, very high on my thanks-giving list.

*That prediction was based on Duma Key. I haven’t read Under the Dome yet. Has anyone else? Thumbs up or down?

If, like me, you are feeling dismayed at the prospect of hauling out your boots and tights and turtlenecks again, when it seems like you just put them away — take heart. Already Pretty gathers together a nice range of alternative options for your winter fashion “basics” from other fashion blogs.

I also subscribed to a few of the blogs AP had highlighted (how am I not already reading Academic Chic?). I think the rise of fashion blogs is an unmitigated Good Thing. Enough of airbrushed supermodels wearing three hours worth of makeup and $5,000 worth of clothes. Thank God, I’m old enough now that they don’t give me a horrible body image, but they don’t give me any useful ideas, either, that I could actually use to improve my appearance in the unairbrushed, budget-conscious, meteorologically unpredictable real world. I want to know how to look good when I have a freelance writer’s clothing budget and a 1.5 mile to work across brick sidewalks. Jimmy Choos are not part of that equation, I tell you what.

Fashion blogs are better for that kind of thing. They’re about style as a thing we live, not a thing we aspire to — and certainly not as a thing we can only earn by having flawless figures and skin and bank accounts. I’m pro-fashion: you can have all the socialist and feminist revolutions you want, but people are always going to want to dress up and look good. We’re a visual, social, cooperative, competitive species. Put that together with opposable thumbs and the capacity to use tools, and you’ve got yourself an animal that’s gonna accessorize, hon. Seems like every couple of years there’s some new archeological dig revealing that decorative fabric or jewelry goes back a few thousand years further than we thought it did.

Dressing up and grooming one’s self is a natural, social function that ought to be about hygiene and joy,* not about self-hatred and excessive consumerism. I think fashion blogs are bringing back the real spirit of that. Magazines don’t; they’re too busy making you feel insecure so that you’ll buy the stuff they advertise.

Do you read fashion blogs? Which ones? I think I’ll be reading a few of the ones AP highlighted, and of course I’m a great fan of Beauty Tips for Ministers and a couple of Muslim fashion blogs. (Everything I know about layering I learned from Muslim fashionistas.) And I’m a great fan of Mrs. O — I hope to get the book for Hanukkah! — although I have been led astray by it before. (Mrs. Obama is six feet tall and has skin the color of chocolate. I am five feet four and have skin the color of halvah. This means that the bold, often mixed patterns and “statement” jewelry that looks so smashing on her makes me look like a badly upholstered fainting couch. I must remember this.)

Do you get anything out of clothes at all, or are you more like Mr. Improbable that way? Would you like to see more fashion blogging on this blog? It wouldn’t be at the expense of other content, just in addition to. Do you have fashion problems you’d like Miss Conduct to solve?

*Okay, because you people know I couldn’t resist it:

Oh Dress, You Merry Gentlefolk
When dressing up for work or fun
Let nothing you dismay.
Remember you can now wear white
Well after Labor Day.
And love your body, dress it up
No matter what you weigh,
O tidings of hygiene and joy
Hygiene and joy!
O tidings of hygiene and joy!

Last week we went to Tupelo’s with some friends. Tupelo’s, as the geographically astute among us might have figured out, specializes in Southern cuisine and it is indeed all that. (And reasonably priced, Boston locals take note.) However authentic the food and drink may be, however, the wait staff is distinctly New England.

One of our friends, who is from the South herself, decided to give our delightful Italian waiter some lessons to expand his Southern repertoire beyond “you all.” I’m not sure if my friend has had server experience herself, but she focused her language lesson on the art of the hidden insult, the deployment of which surely everyone who works with the public would find a soothing balm to their psyche.

The phrase she taught him was “Bless his/her heart.” This, apparently, is a codicil to conversation that will alert one’s fellow Southerner that one does not, in fact, approve of the individual whose heart has just been blessed. As in, “My sister in law certainly does love her Yankee Swap,* bless her heart,” or a simple, “Ahmedinejad, bless his heart.” Our waiter seemed to like this a lot, and I wonder how many “Of course we can substitute olive oil for bacon drippings, bless your heart”s he’ll be muttering in days to come.

(*The mere existence of the Yankee Swap ought to be enough to convince anyone that the South, despite its iron-fist-in-velvet-glove reputation, has not entirely cornered the market on sweet-seeming passive aggression.)

UPDATE: Voting is now closed, and the winner is JDS for “Waiting for Gourdot, It’s True.” Congrats! JDS, please e-mail me for details of how to get your tickets to Tru Grace. And thanks to all who entered!

Good job on the holiday song parodies, folks! It took a while to get going, but there were some good entries, with a lot of topical humor. Here are the top five for you to vote on:

“Thumbsy the T-man” by WXB

Using my cellphone
Driving MBTA trains
Braking here and there, so you’d best beware
Or you’ll fly through window panes

Chorus: Bumpity-bump-bump, Bumpity-bump-bump
Look at my train go
Bumpity-bump-bump, Bumpity-bump-bump
Running off into the snow)

Running through stoplights
Sending jokes by SMS
And they won’t catch me if I don’t hit trees
‘Cuz the T’s a stinkin’ mess

I won’t get fired
Even if I text and drive
But if some wise St. Nick snaps a cell-phone pic
My career will take a dive

“Waiting For Gourdot, It’s True” by JDS

(To the tune of Foreigner’s “Waiting for a Girl Like You,” comparing the waiting of Linus for the Great Pumpkin to Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” The song is abridged, and so is the explanation. But I did like how surreal this was, and that it was an alternative to Christmas songs):

So long
I’ve been looking so hard, I’ve been waiting so long

Sometimes I don’t know what I would do
If The Great Pumpkin jumped and said “BOO!”

When will Pumpkin come?
When will Pumpkin come?

Halloween Night, so warm and still
I need to know, is my mind just ill?

Maybe I’m wrong
It would kill me if I’ve been wrong all along
This pumpkin patch has hurt me before
This time, I hope to see more

I’ve been waiting
For Gourdot, it’s true
To rise up in the night

I’ve been waiting
For Gourdot, it’s true
To spread love and delight

I’ve been waiting
For Pumpkin-news
To make me feel I’m right

Yeah, waiting
For Gourdot, it’s true
Ev’ry Halloween night

“Tight Christmas 2″ by MAH

I’m dreaming of a Flush Christmas
Just like the ones I use to know.
Where the gold cards glisten,
And boutiques listen,
To hear us ringing up the dough.

I’m thinking it’s a tight Christmas
Just because I’m unemployed.
And the fees I’m fetching,
On payments I’m missing,
Has left my credit score destroyed.

I’m scheming for a light Christmas
With every lender I approach.
May my thrift shop finds be designer like Coach,
And secondhand clothing be not gauche.

“I Think Daddy Kidnapped Santa Claus” by BobP

I think Daddy kidnapped Santa Claus
Just to steal that old guy’s lifetime gig

Pop’s needed work for months
He’s unemployed, feels like a dunce
You’d never guess that he was head
Of General Motors once

But now he’d kill to score that seasonal job
With perks the UAW couldn’t match
And he’d trade his Escalade
To zip around in a really sweet sleigh
I’m sure Daddy kidnapped Santa Claus!

…and finally, the last entry, which was a nice year-end roundup:

“Have Yourself a Hopeful Little Christmas” by Linda Courtemanche

Have yourself a hopeful little Christmas,
With Barack in charge –
His to-do list
Makes Santa’s seem far from large!

Have yourself a healthy little Christmas…
Swine flu, go away!
Pass health care
That doesn’t make us overpay!

We remember the golden days,
Days with MJ, Farrah,Ted –
Now it’s Sonia up on the Court,
And more Mayor M. ahead!

Now next year
the Sox will beat the Yankees,
if the Fates allow…
Hang Youk’s action figure on the highest bough…
And have yourself a merry little Christmas now!

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Voting will be open until 5pm on Friday, November 29, and the winner will be announced and contacted then. Thank you for your entries, everyone!

This post will run at the top until Friday; new content will be below.

Finally, this isn’t eligible for the contest, but a special thanks to kmd123, for this “thinly disguised shameless attempt to butter up Miss Conduct”:

In the eighth day of ChannuKwanzaaMasYear, Ms. Conduct gave to me
Eight nosy neighbors
Seven noisy cubicle-mates
Six tasteful hostess gifts
Five rude retorts
Four dog-owning guests
Three sneezing atheists
Two meddling in-laws
And a year’s worth of great advice!

kmd123 couldn’t make it up to twelve; may I suggest “Twelve cell phones ringing, eleven store clerks snarking, ten chuggers guilting, nine noisy iPods …”?

Proper hygiene is on everyone’s minds this season. I invite you to check out a new report on hand sanitizing by business professor emeritus John Trinkhaus.

John won the 2003 Ig Nobel Literature Prize for “meticulously collecting data and publishing more than 80 detailed academic reports about things that annoyed him. (Such as: What percentage of young people wear baseball caps with the peak facing to the rear rather than to the front; what percentage of pedestrians wear sport shoes that are white rather than some other color; what percentage of swimmers swim laps in the shallow end of a pool rather than the deep end; what percentage of automobile drivers almost, but not completely, come to a stop at one particular stop-sign; what percentage of commuters carry attaché cases; what percentage of shoppers exceed the number of items permitted in a supermarket’s express checkout lane; and what percentage of students dislike the taste of Brussels sprouts.)”

Here’s a nice article about moi in a Boston University alumni magazine. Lots of good pictures, especially of Milo! (It’s relevant: he’s a terrier. I thought it was so funny when I was accepted to BU that I would be going to a school with a terrier mascot. All my life, I’ve loved dogs — except for terriers. The one type I couldn’t tolerate, the one sort of dog I’d never own, never … never say never, eh?) And, featuring an appearance by the Golden Rod Rainbow Stripe Shawl Sweater Shrug Cardigan!

Notice, too, the clever bit of design where it looks like I’m holding the headline with my chopsticks.

… is online here.

More careery musings …

When I was in college, I worked as the director’s assistant on a production of Hamlet. (Never had more fun on a show in my life. You want backstage camaraderie, private jokes galore, and excellent cast parties: do a tragedy. Comedies are only fun for the audience.) “Director’s assistant,” unlike a lot of jobs in theater, is about as ill-defined as the responsibilities of a superhero’s sidekick. What the director told me on Hamlet, though, was this: “Your job is to offer me suggestions to say ‘no’ to.”

I was awfully glad he explained that, because he did say no to just about every idea I had, and it could have gotten quite demoralizing otherwise. But as he explained it, the exercise of thinking through my suggestions, and why they would or would not work, helped hone his vision of the play. Everything that he said no to was something that was carved away, leaving a leaner, more focused production in its wake.

I’ve never forgotten that, obviously, and I’m really glad that I had that experience, and with a teacher and mentor who taught me what it was all about. I recently finished a huge project at my Harvard job — my boss’s first book is being published this spring, and we were in final edits until alarmingly recently. And a good deal of what I was doing, during the last few months and weeks, was offering my boss suggestions that he said no to. Let’s remove this chapter. No. Let’s take this part out and put it here. No. Let’s add this variable to this graph. No.

They weren’t bad suggestions on my part. And he wasn’t necessarily wrong to say no to them, either. They were valid ideas that needed to be considered, and I think the act of saying, “This is what my book isn’t” helped my boss clarify what, indeed, his book was.

There’s the job that’s written down in the job description, and then there’s the job you’re actually hired to do. In a functional workplace, these two jobs are at least roughly correlated. But “managing the boss” is part of every job. So is “socializing in a way that is subdued enough not to make you gossip fodder but lively enough to make it look that you are actually having fun and not just putting in an appearance because it’s expected” (welcome to holiday season!). There’s always emotional or intellectual labor involved, whether you are a professor or a plumber, a sales clerk or a psychiatrist.

What kind of emotional/intellectual labor do you wind up doing in all your jobs? As noted, I’m the ideas/alternative perspectives person, and thanks to Professor Ron Willis, I know when to fight for my ideas and when to let them go. The ConductMom is the Difficult People Whisperer. (Note to anyone who’s worked with her: Oh, she liked you. They didn’t assign her to you because you’re difficult. Really. She told me.) Other people become the party planners, the morale chiefs, the bureaucracy wranglers … what job do you always have, regardless of what job title you might be sporting?

There have been so many interesting answers to my “Career planning!” post that I thought I’d address some of them here, rather than replying in comments as I usually do. Just as we sometimes get a little Iggy or Jewy or Shakespearean around here now and then, I think we’re headed for a small stretch of career self-management thinking. Hope you’re all up for it. Given that it’s both 1) what I’m trying to do for myself at the moment, and 2) a big part of what I study at my HBS job, it’s a wee bit inevitable.

First off, geekgirl99 gave this as her worst career advice ever received:

Bad advice: “If you could be happy doing anything else, you shouldn’t go into music.” – Nadia Boulanger

Hear hear! (To the classification of this as bad advice, not to the sentiment itself.) As a writer … and a former academic … and a theater major … and a friend to many, many artists, actors, musicians, academics, and the like … that statement is nonsense. I think there are only two kinds of people who make those “If you could be happy doing anything besides acting, do it!” or “People become writers because they have no choice but to write!” One kind are the people in the field who want to feel special, called in some way, or at least not to feel so bad that they are 30 years old and don’t have health insurance. There isn’t any shame in being 30 years old with no health insurance — but there’s no great romance or meaning to it, either. Really, you could have taken the real estate class and become a leasing agent. You chose not to, which is fine, but it really is a choice. The muse invites you to dance, she doesn’t mug you in an alley.

The other kind of people, and I think these are more numerous, are the non-artists who don’t realize that it is possible to make something akin to a middle-class living in the arts. Maybe not the two-story-house-kids-in-private-schools kind of middle class, but the ramen-is-not-the-only-option middle class. People who aren’t in the arts often have a vague notion that one out of a thousand artists is fabulously wealthy a la Stephen King or Andy Warhol, and the other 999 are starving in an attic. It’s not true. Plenty of folks manage to make a living doing their art, and also doing copyediting, or voiceover work, or teaching, or busking, or working in a box office, or doing any of the other dozens if not hundreds of jobs in and around the artworld, or applying its skills.

So this advice is based on a wrong analysis of the labor market, and I think also on a wrong, 19th-century Romantic notion of the artist. Some people feel their art is a calling; for others, it’s simply something they are competent at. For some artists the work itself is the point; for others, the work is but a way to communicate with other people. As I write, I’m realizing that the reason this bugs me so much is that this advice is so very frequently given to young people with artistic ambitions. And I’m not a fan of incorrect and condescending advice given to the yout’. Buck up, yout’. If you want to be an actor or a musician or a writer you probably can. You might just have to do some other things, too. And if you’re not sure if you want to be an actor or a musician or a writer — well, try it! Don’t let people intimidate you into feeling you’re not a “real” artist if you’re unwilling to suffer.

Stupendousness also had a good “aha” moment:

So while I might make a good detective, I wouldn’t be happy as one. I’ve had that realization about many careers. There are tons of things I think I would be good at, but I don’t think I would necessarily like going to that work everyday.

There’s another good question: what’s something you would be good at, but you think would make you unhappy? And who identifies with JoGeek?:

I’m almost resigned to the idea that I could never stay interested in a single career for long enough to pay off the student loans that got me there. So I work a baseline job that I can tolerate and pursue hobbies instead. Much less of an investment for an eternal dilettante.

I know I do. (In fact, you can chart the rising and falling fortunes of my self-esteem on any given day by whether I would describe myself as a “dilettante” or a “Renaissance woman.”) In fact, tossing all notion of statistical proof to the winds and going with the anecdotal data that most gracefully leaps to mind, I’d say the happiest people I know, careerwise, are either those who have a “baseline job” and lots of hobbies, like JoGeek; multiple jobs/gigs that keep things from getting boring; or a job that requires continuous learning — of things you want to learn, I mean, not the new e-mail security system or how to fill out the new TPS reports.

Anne with an E‘s comment intrigued me — she wrote, “I’ve always tended to want to be ‘just like’ people instead of pursuing a particular field.” Yes, I get that too … the idea of a way of life being the thing that is attractive, a worldview. And the props. When I was a kid growing up in Kansas, my idea of what I kind of job I wanted to have changed quite frequently — psychologist, professor, director, novelist, reporter, lawyer* — but I knew what kind of life I wanted to have: one in a big city, in an apartment with hardwood floors, a subscription to the New Yorker (in some blissful, enlightened future in which I would finally understand all the cartoons), with friends who would debate politics and literature over wine late into the evening. That ideal never changed. I think that is kind of what Anne with an E is talking about.

Please, these ideas are all so interesting — keep sharing!

*That one didn’t last too long.

Longtime readers may remember my Easy Greek casserole recipe. Melissa at Better Bag of Groceries blogged it today, along with pictures! Her version looks even tastier than mine …