All right, pay attention. There's stuff going on. First thing going on is there's a damn mosquito in my studio. I'm telling you, it's a big ass mosquito.
And I have bug spray here. I have professional strength bug spray. And I can't catch this son of a bitch. And he thought you might even hear him through the microphone when he buzzes by.
He buzzes by just to make me mad. Hate it. Ooh, this, this, this. We're gonna talk about the holidays today.
It's Monday. And welcome to the Daily Grateful. I am Michael Cross and I am grateful. I'm not grateful for this damn mosquito.
One mosquito in my studio. My soundproof, you know, sound treated studio. And this son of a bitch is just flying around now. It's hiding right now.
I can't see it, I can't hear it, but I've been listening to my headphones. You can hear it through microphone. It just flies right in front of my computer screen. Makes me mad.
Damn it. Anyway, hi. How y' all doing? Are you having a good day?
I was sick this weekend. I wasn't. This stomach thing come through. It's real bad on Friday and Saturday it was not good, but better, you know.
And then Sunday, better yet. And it was. It's not perfect yet, but it's a lot better. But I gotta tell you, Friday was.
Anyway, are you glad Halloween is over? I am so damn glad that Halloween is over. I was expecting my grandkids to come by, you know, we bought a big bag. I do this all the time.
I bought a big ass bag of really good candy giveaway, you know, good stuff. And had the lights on, had my massive decorations out. My massive decorations, by the way, include a old electric pumpkin that the bulb has not gone out yet and it sits in the corner of my garage and collects dust all year. And on Halloween, I take it out.
I have this little plastic table that is not gonna. I don't know if it's gonna last another year. I set that down, I plug it in and boom goes it. There it is.
The guy across the street puts up all these tombstones and monsters and lights and blah, blah. And I just put this out and he gets jealous and. But anyway, I did Halloween and when it was all over with, I found out my grandkids weren't coming because they were sick and they weren't going out for Halloween. So that was fine.
I had a whole ton of Halloween candy. So the next day I went over there and. Which is Friday, I guess I went over there and brought them a ton of Halloween candy because I wanted to get out of the house. What I left in the house was a bag of malt balls that Zach had bought.
And I haven't eaten any, but, you know, because I'm having all these stomach problems. But they're there and I will get to them. But anyway, the topic of today's wonderful and strange podcast is surviving the holidays. Because they're here now.
You can't walk into a store without seeing Christmas stuff everywhere. Used to be when I was a kid, you saw Thanksgiving stuff Starting around the 1st of November, you know, you saw the fall stuff. My last ex wife used to do what she called fall. The house put up fall crap all over the house.
It was nice. It was pleasant. Actually, wife number two did the same thing. All this pleasant stuff all over the house.
That was nice. And then the day after Thanksgiving is when all the Christmas stuff starts. Not anymore. No, no, no, no, no, no.
I go into Lowe's to buy a tool, and this was like a week ago. And there's Christmas crap everywhere. Very expensive trees, all kinds of stuff. I am not a big holiday person anymore.
Used to be yesterday, but, you know, I'm older now. I'm just not. Chances are real good I will not see my, you know, the grandkids or anybody, because they're gonna be over at grandma's house, I'm sure. And I don't know, Thanksgiving.
No plans for Thanksgiving this year. Usually there's that damn bug again. Anyway, usually I've done. What I've done in the past is.
Well, one year, my daughter and this girlfriend of hers came before she lived back here in Florida when she lived out in Kansas. So this has been a number of years. They came out and made a turkey and tried to kill us. I have eaten my last.
And we all. Almost all. We all got sick. It was.
It was horrible food poisoning. And also, I'm not doing the turkey thing ever again. I'm not buying the turkey thing. You ever seen the law firm Morgan and Morgan?
John Morgan did a video about this. He is so damn right. Turkeys are disgusting. They don't taste good.
If turkeys were so damn good, how come in the middle of summer, you don't run up to the grocery store and buy a turkey and bring it? You only make turkey on Thanksgiving or Christmas, and then you, you know, it's dry, it doesn't taste good. It doesn't have great taste at all. It's just a throwaway bird.
No. No more turkeys. Rib roast that's the way to go is a rib roast. And I can make a mean ass rib roast.
I can. As a matter of fact, I'm buying a special thing and I'll probably just make a rib roast for me because I don't think anybody else is out of here. But rib roast I make. You know, I, I did that when I had a whole house full of kids and family.
I said to the, the former Mrs. Gross, when not doing turkey this year, we're doing a rib roast. And off to Publix we went. What a big ass rib roast.
And we did that. And it was good. It was really, really, really good. We've done turkey before.
I made the best turkey ever. And by the way, if you listen to this show on Thanksgiving, the Thanksgiving version of the show that comes out whenever the hell Thanksgiving is, is going to be a Thanksgiving show that I did many, many, many years ago, a whole bunch of years ago. And I'm just gonna publish that where I talk about Thanksgiving and I talk about the five bladed silver bladed Boy Scout knife with a handle. I'm just gonna rerun the tape.
Back when life was better than it is now, I thought, or I don't know, I'm going to do that. But how do we get through holidays? When you are not in a holiday mood, when you're fighting through all this, when all the stuff that used to be important is now gone? Number one, and this is the best advice I can give you is set the bar low.
If you set the bar low and forget the perfect holiday crap, then you're going to be good. Stay off of social media. I did that last year. I did.
I did not appear on social media last year. I just did that. The other thing I do is I get out and walk more. I get up during the day or in the afternoon and evening, I will take a long walk and I do not watch television.
Because you watch television. Or what I'll do is I'll go and watch Netflix movies, usually good crime shows. That's what I watch, you know, is what I remember one Christmas I spent all day alone. Everybody had somewhere else to go and they all went.
And I was sitting here in my happy ass all by myself. And I had. This was back when we had DVRs. So this has been a little while.
I had DVR'd a bunch of horrible, and I mean absolutely, disgustingly horrible Lifetime movies. And I spent the day watching horrible Lifetime movies. And they're all the same. A young couple, you're a young woman meets the perfect guy falls in love.
He turns out to be a disaster, or even a murder and kidnaps one of her kids or does something really bad. And then the ending is always the same, but because somebody comes to the rescue and saves the whole day. But the last scene of all of these movies is, tell me if I'm right about this. It's always the same thing.
It's three months later and you see, oh, we're so happy. Yeah, we just went through trauma. Yes, my kids were kidnapped. Yes, my mother was almost murdered.
But we're also happy now. And there's nice music and you know, and we're all saying, golly gee, that's probably gonna happen to me Sunday. No, no, no. So that's what I did on Christmas.
You wanna know something? I had such a good time watching all this so predictable stuff. It wasn't even funny, you know, And I like it. And then here's the other thing you do.
You treat yourself. Do something that actually makes you happy. You happy. You know what makes me happy?
Really good music. And I mean good music surrounding the whole existence of the room. Not just the headphones, but the whole existence of the room. Really good music that makes me happy.
Small, selective socializing. Small. Very, very, very small. Meet with a few friends.
Talk with a few friends. I don't generally go to holiday parties because usually holiday parties are drunk fest. And I have bad memories of going to holiday parties with someone that was in my life not long ago. I shouldn't be talking about her, but.
No, but I'm not going to. But I remember them. But sometimes the best holiday survival plan. Do you want to know what it is?
I'm gonna tell you what it is. Sometimes it's like grief. Sometimes the best holiday survival plan is just going through it and getting through it. That's what we do with grief.
We go through it. There's no tricks. You just go through it. Holidays.
And you don't want to do the holiday thing. You just go through it. Yeah. By the way, did you know that the has truck this year is now 50 bucks?
They started off at 3 bucks. I buy one for one of my grandsons every year since he was a baby. When he was a tiny, tiny baby, I sent a hestruck up to him. They said he's not.
He's got a hestruck. I have her son. Oh, well, see you tomorrow.