Weekly Features for the Start of the Holiday Season

As I sat around, enjoying the waning hours of the long Thanksgiving weekend, it became time to update our weekly features.  We begin with the top five leftovers.

5. Stuffing - Hold onto the feeling of Thanksgiving and deny the existence of the real world outside for as long as possible by heating up a plate of this warm, bread-based, holiday specific side dish.

4. Turkey - One of the most versatile leftovers.  Hot, cold, on a sandwich, even in a stew, it works.  But if you ate as much of it as I did, you may be burnt out.  It doesn't help that the meat already tends to be dry and only gets dryer as it's reheated.

3. Cranberry sauce - Dry turkey is where cranberry sauce comes in.  It adds moisture and flavor to the reheated bird and stands the test of refrigeration like a champ.

2. Pumpkin pie - You may have noticed that I'm all about holding on to the past.  Continuing to celebrate autumn with pumpkin flavored food is a good way to dig your nails into the the fleeting moments of the season and draw blood before it gives way to winter.  Without question, pumpkin pie is the best pumpkin flavored food ever.  I said no questions!

1. Mashed potatoes - I could eat bowls at a time.  Of course, this may be because my grandmother still makes the absolute best mashed potatoes on the face of the earth.

This week's cool-ass thing you will never own is a boom crane.  Hanging holiday decorations would be a lot easier and involve less fear of falling to your death if you had a platform to lift you to your roof.  You would need enough money to buy a luxury car and an unhealthy obsession with outdoing your neighbors, however.

The sign you are a nerd for the week is that you have decided to rely on data to choose gifts for others this year.  Whether compiling the stats yourself or using a program like GiveEmThis, you have decided to mathematically calculate the gift most likely to please your targeted receiver by accessing their social media posts.

This week's nemesis is raisins.  Though not everyone's cup of tea, I happen to think they are delicious.  But when you take into account their propensity to clump together, it causes it to look like I added some oatmeal to my bowl of raisins instead of the other way around.

This week's lesson learned is to force people to take home leftovers form the Thanksgiving dinner you hosted.  On top of looking generous, you'll have extra space in your refrigerator and more variety to your next week's worth of meals.

Trying to take care of your holiday shopping early and trying to do so within a budget without seeming cheap?  Use this week's equation to figure out how much to spend on a given person...

You can calculate appropriate cost (c) by dividing the amount of time you have known the person in years (T, less than 1 represented as 1) by the person's age in years (a) and adding that product to the result of the number of people who will witness the gift presentation (w) divided by the mathematical representation of which social circle the person is in with you (s; work=2, family=5 as they are more likely to still love you after receiving a crappy gift and Facebook only=10) then multiplying that sum by the level of influence the recipient has over your everyday life on a scale of 1-5 (i) and the genuine love you have for that person also on a 1-5 scale (l).

Finally, this week's Star Wars quote is, "That's two you own me, junior."

Here's to the holiday spirit.  Remember to treat your fellow man kindly, which means not elbowing them in the chest or pepper-spraying them while racing across Wal-Mart to get the best deal.