Through Facebook, it was recently revealed to me that several of my friends were under the impression that “Up on the housetop, reindeer PAWS.” (The actual line is “reindeer pause.”)

Did you think this? Did you ever wonder why all other reindeer have hooves, but Santa’s have paws? (Genetics are complex, perhaps the mutation that allowed them to fly had unexpected consequences, sort of how like if you breed foxes for tameness they also develop floppy ears.)

Did you wonder who “Olive, the Other Reindeer” was? How about Round John Virgin? I’d heard those two mondegreens before, but not the reindeer one.

Because I am a theater geek, having to actually think about the lyrics of “Up on the Housetop” made me come up with A Very Pinter Christmas:

Scene: Up on the housetop.

Woman: Reindeer.

(Pause.)

But you don’t have to play my reindeer games. Instead, here’s an open thread for cute kid stories — your kids, or your own kid-hood — holiday-season misconceptions.

My own? Apparently, the first Christmas that I was cognizant at all of what was going on, I got really upset when it was time to go to bed on Christmas night (not Christmas Eve). Why? Because I’d taken “You’ll get presents on Christmas” extremely literally, and thought that they would disappear the next day as magically as they had appeared that morning!

This came up when I was chatting with a friend last night, and I can’t believe neither I nor any of the commenters thought of it back when we were discussing bad acronyms:

PCP for “Primary Care Provider.”

As I wrote to my friend (we were chatting on Facebook), “BTW, PCP = TLA WTF?”

Tired? Run-down? Not enough energy for all the family, work, and community obligations of the holiday season? Shaw’s Supermarket knows exactly how you feel:

You can find this graphic on their website, but it awesomely came up in a commercial last night during either “Parks and Recreation” or “The Office.” Reinforced Michael Scott’s statement that “Christmas isn’t about Santa, or Jesus — it’s about the workplace” in an oblique sort of way.

(Don’t even ask me why I’m still watching “The Office.” Just feeling too listless last night to turn the TV off after “Parks & Rec,” I guess.)

Teabag tag: “The mind is energy. Regulate it.”

Is that, like, a political statement masquerading as a bit of New Age advice? Kind of sounds like it to me. Drill, baby, drill!

For the history of the teabag-tag wars, go here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, and here.

Who chose this graphic for this ad? And will this give rise to a new dozens insult: “Yo mama so ugly even Obama don’t want her to go back to school?”

Coincidences never cease. Cousin Dan doesn’t always read my blog, so he’d missed my post on “When acronyms go bad.” But he’d left D.C. for his hometown of Springfield for Thanksgiving, and posted on his Facebook a photo of the local flea market:

The Springfield Trading Depot. From a review on Yelp:

Don’t let the state of the place fool you, either. You will always find the vintage treasures or tacky gifts here that you heart so desires. So, pack your hand sanitizers, some tissues and a soda and your set for your STD excursion!

Thanks, Dan!

(For those of you keeping track at home, Dan went as a 1970s undercover cop for Halloween, and thanks you all for your suggestions. I’ve seen FB pictures of his costume, too, and thought he looked good, although he claims not to have been feeling it. Cousin Dan is a Halloween artiste, and like all true artists is his own worst critic.)

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.

I am enjoying all your tales of career advice and aspirations, both good and bad! Please keep them coming.

Here’s a fun experiment: post as your status update that you’re taking a day to contemplate your career, and ask your friends what you should do next. The answers will amuse you. So far I’ve gotten:

* Have a child
* Become a ballerina (those two were the “restructure your pelvic cage at age 40!” answers)
* Send your pic and bio to casting agents –especially those working on Star Trek
projects in need of Vulcans
* Become a high-class hooker
* Be a “slacker Oprah”
* Start a Kenny Rogers cover band
* Learn Spanish and get on one of their soap operas (“Can you beat your fists into the chest of your leading man and scream out raspy pleas of exasperation at his infidelity?”)
* Be a rabbi
* World domination. As a benevolent dictator.
* Rock climbing
* Parkour
* Go back to school and be a paramedic

Try it yourself, and see what your friends really think of you — or what their own projected fantasy lives are!

Hey guys, we’re having another creative contest over at the boston.com blog! This one is to write parodies of holiday song lyrics — thanks to all of you who came up with that idea!

Details are over yonder. You can leave your entries on this blog or the other one, and we’ll probably be doing voting here next week. Let’s get those parodies ringagling, ting-ting-tingaling too!

There are only 26 letters in the English alphabet, which has proven sufficient for a lexicon of some quarter of a million words or so, but nonetheless appears inadequate for creating non-repeating acronyms. How many times have you changed jobs to find out that at XYZ Corp., “TPS report” stands for “Tactics, Priorities & Strategies Report,” while at NewCo, “TPS reports” means “Talk to the President’s Secretary, she’ll report it to him so you don’t have to.”

I was thinking about that this weekend, when a friend of mine posted the following link to his Facebook page:

I’ve said it before: aren’t moms amazing? I swear, motherhood gives you political — and apparently hostage-negotiation — skills like nothing else. (As my friend said, “I feel sorry for the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, but that’s got to be a hell of a recruiting tool.”)

I have to show you the graphic, because if you follow the actual link, someone at the Christian Science Monitor clearly had the big “D’oh!” and removed the last two words since it was originally posted.

(Author’s note: If you don’t know what a MILF is, I’m not telling you. You are by definition on the internet as you read this. Go look it up.)

So it got me to thinking about other acronyms that go two ways, or more than two. I used to work in central administration at Harvard when we were installing a new HR and payroll system, the doing of which required us to get clear on a lot of our HR policies and practices. Anyway, you can take two kinds of medical leave at Harvard: short- and long-term disability. Which are referred to by, of course, acronyms.

Which is why, when the benefits lady said, “We more or less consider pregnancy to be an STD,” I really shouldn’t have choked on my coffee and blurted out, “Good Lord, I don’t even want kids and I find that offensively cynical!”

Acronym lag. It happens to the best of us. Share your stories (SOS)!

Teabag tag says:

The only tool you need is kindness.

Robin says:

If kindness is all you have, you’re a tool.

For the history of the teabag-tag wars, go here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Tomorrow is Milo’s fourth “Gotcha Day” with us! I wrote a little essay about him on his second, and a poem for him on his third. Digging through some old computer files, recently, I found something I’d written a couple of months after we got him, that will suffice as this year’s celebratory post:

Much as I often type “teh” instead of “the,” I’ve discovered–since the arrival of Milo, our adorable mixed-breed rescue dog–that I usually type “god” when I mean “dog.” I always manage to notice this and correct it, usually with an obscure feeling of guilt. However, if I hadn’t, here are some of the things I would have written in various e-mails to friends in the past month:

• If you’re really not up for having a god in the house along with the new baby that’s perfectly okay.

• He is a great god, bra fetish notwithstanding.

• And we have a new god, who is a constant source of puzzlement and delight, and who appears to find us much the same.

• He’s a gentle god but “calm” is not a word I would use to describe him.

• We are working on “quiet god” right now.

• My husband and my god like each other.

• If anyone is afraid of or allergic to gods be assured that he will be crated and upstairs during our meeting. If anyone likes gods you can go meet him after we’ve concluded our business.

• The important question is how are you doing these days, and the really important question is when are you going to come admire my new god?

• And can I force you all to admire the attached picture of my new god, bravely defending us against an evil, scary bunch of bananas?

• He doesn’t feel the need to mark his territory as male gods often do.

• On the upside, I LOVE MY NEW GOD! He is the BEST god ever and we just signed the adoption papers today.

Happy Gotcha Day, little man. While your humans are cavorting in Italy, you are staying with a friend in the country, and I hope you are having a wonderful time. We are probably looking at all of the Italian dogs and saying to ourselves, and sometimes each other, “That dog’s not as cute as Milo.” You remain a source of puzzlement and delight to us, and it appears we remain so to you, as well.

And here, for anyone who cares to see it, is the picture of Milo the second night we had him, defending his new home against that sleeper cell of terrorist bananas (he’d been barking at them, so we put them on the floor and let him investigate):

Mr. Improbable and I are off on a much-needed trip to Italy. I will be very glad of this. The past few months have been a long haul for me of minor but debilitating health problems (allergies and back problems in addition to the “sick” I blogged about earlier) and work stresses. I feel I’ve been just managing to fulfill the barest of my responsibilities — getting the columns done, though never in advance, and the blogs kept more-or-less up to date, and my Harvard Business School job more-or-less under control.

Things will be better when we get back, I hope: I have reason to think my health problems won’t bother me so much for a while, and the Big Project at my Harvard job is almost entirely done, and I’ve made a few decisions that ought to lighten the load for me for a while.

I also sent around an e-mail to some of my friends who had really helped me out, or listened to me rant, or been gracious when I canceled plans on them for the third time in a row because of some health or work emergency. People really are there for you, you know. When they say, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do” — you can, if there is. We all want to be independent and self-sufficient, but sometimes it’s good to remember that other people will put up with your nonsense, because they love you.

Even when you’re covered in bees!

See you in November! I’ve got a couple of posts scheduled to go up while we’re gone, but posting will be light. If you leave a comment and you haven’t commented before, it won’t go through until I moderate it, which might not be until I get back.

Many of you are probably familiar with Etsy, the online crafts store — “Your place to buy and sell all things handmade,” which brings individual craftspeople and customers together. So, after the High Holidays, and inspired by a friend’s mention that she had bought a beautiful wedding headdress from Etsy, I thought Etsy might just be the place to pick up one of those pretty beaded-mesh yarmulkes that one of my readers had mentioned last year. So I bop on over to the site, go to the “Religious” category, choose “Jewish” — and what should I find but this:

The Antler Menorah.

Described by its creator, JewishCowboy, as “A real unique artwork, made to be handed down for generations to come. Made by hand, guided by faith.” He goes on to add, helpfully, “If you have questions, please ask.”

I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

His other offerings tend toward the wall-plaque variety, including this gem:

I’m not so sure barbed wire is the ideal medium for Judaica, given, you know, history.

(Yes, I have submitted these to Regretsy, the online equivalent of The Museum of Bad Art. But I had to share it with you first, because you, like the Antler Menorah, are very very special to me. And also real unique.)