Marvin (my personal robot assistant)! Can you come in here for a few minutes and vacuum up all these fragments? No, not with your mouth! Use your upholstery attachment. Silly robot.
Lots to do around the holidays, as you well know. Some tasks are more challenging than others. I’ve always found bending candy canes particularly difficult. A lot of breakage. There’s got to be a better way! (Matt is thinking about taking a correspondence course in pretzel-bending, so maybe some of those skills will be transferable. We shall see.)
As I was saying last week, we have some holiday traditions that we try to observe on a yearly basis. Some of them could be described as strange; others, just a little off the beaten path. Occasionally we try out a new “tradition” and see if it sticks, like that year we put the man-sized tuber on an upside-down wash basin and decorated him like a Christmas tree. I think that was Anti-Lincoln’s idea. Anyway, it lacked that kind of stickiness I was referring to earlier. (Tubey still isn’t talking to Anti-Lincoln … not that tubey talks all that much ordinarily.)
Probably our best-known tradition is writing, recording, and releasing a parcel of Christmas songs – that is, Christmas-themed pop songs. That stretches way back to the late 1980s when brother Matt used to hand out cassette tapes to all and sundry on Christmas eve. Our first album, 2000 Years to Christmas, was a collection of some of our favorites from those ancient tapes – 13 songs drawn 
from what was easily a catalog of about 60 to 75 songs in total over eight years or so. (That was a large component of Matt’s musical output, though by far not the majority of songs he wrote over that period.)
Now we put them out on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. Some of the ones we’ve put out in recent years are additional selections from Matt’s cassette tape holiday basket, re-recorded in our basement studio. Others are more recent concoctions.
So, look under your tree this Christmas for another parcel of holiday cheer from Big Green. Got a laptop and wi-fi? Plunk it under the tree and point your browser to big-green.net/pod. It’s that simple. Santa works in mysterious ways.
Yes, yes … we’re polishing up the holiday songs here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. T’is the season and all that. What, you’re not familiar with the dirge of the Christmas Bot? Small wonder. We just made it up. What kind of songwriters would we be if we resorted to used Christmas Carols? It would be a total cop out. So we are resolved to write lame Christmas numbers each and every December, five minutes before we hastily record them and throw them up on the internet. You’re welcome!
Oh, yes, my friends. Even here at the Cheney Hammer Mill we are preparing for the impending holiday season. Not without some trepidation, of course. Lord knows this time of year puts people into a kind of feeding frenzy, hyperactive shopping fever, whatever. They lose their reason. They get impatient and even nasty. It’s a rough world out there, man. So why would we add our madness to the pile? No reason. Just looking for a way to keep busy.