GRAY SKIES ARE GOING TO CLEAR UP!

You should never give up on life. Never. Even if you're having a really shitty day. Because you never know when something fantastic will happen — like winning a plastic snowman in a drawing! Which, believe it or not, actually happened to me at work yesterday. Just as I settled into my cubicle for a long winter's nap, some grumpy elf from HR whips by my desk, announces my name like she's serving a subpoena, and hands me a foot-high Frosty.

"I won?" I ask, in utter disbelief, as the elf speeds away. My trembling fingers hover over my mouth like a new Miss America.

My co-workers pop over their cubes and echo "You won?" "You won?"

One colleague's voice is tinged with envy — the one who pulled me downstairs to the employee recognition ceremony in the first place, the one whose lead I followed in signing up for the drawing. You won, she says, with a distinct emphasis on the you. She cannot believe it, and she is unmistakably jealous behind the veneer of her first-runner-up smile. She doesn't even need that decorative snowman, a plain Jane like her; she doesn't even wear earrings or rouge, for Pete's sake, I can hear her thinking.

And it's true. I don't need any of the things available in the drawing — not a DVD of some Hallmark TV movie I've never heard of, not a CD of Celine Dion making merry, not an insulated lunch box with the company name on the side; and certainly not a faux-wood Frosty with a pinhead and a miniature carrot for a nose; mostly what I need is something to do with my hands, because things like employee recognition ceremonies — events where you're thrown together in a punchbowl setting with people you wouldn't normally drink punch with — make me feel ridiculously self-conscious and awkward. So writing my name down on 50 pieces of paper and stuffing them in a fishbowl helps take my mind off that stress.

And in this instance it also helped make me a WINNER. I've never won anything in a drawing. Not that I can remember. I mean, I'm sure in grade school I came up tops in a drawing to see who would erase the chalkboards, or who would get chosen last for a team, but that's not quite the same. And I've been close to a winner; in junior high my sister won a $50 U.S. Savings Bond at some community raffle (I remember my mom telling her that it wasn't really worth $50 yet, but if you waited 130 years it would be worth like $90 — and my sister's eyes got big with anticipation).

So the cool thing about winning something is that it makes you a winner. You are feeling like a loser — and then presto! — you are a winner. Everyone wants to be you.

And I mean everyone. How many people stopped by my desk to marvel at my good fortune? Too many to count, I can tell you that.

The first thing I did with my Frosty was flip it over and examine the label on the bottom. Some Miss Manners in HR had made a perfunctory attempt to blot out its price with a blue ballpoint pen. $12.99 it clearly said under the angry chicken scratch. And SuperTarget. And Made in China.

Immediately my co-worker Susie says, "You can take it back and get the cash. Tell them you lost the receipt."

"Why would I do that?" I say.

"Or you could put it on your porch," she offers, seeing that her first suggestion had tended to devalue my prize and deflate my pride in winning. "Yeah, put it on your porch."

"Yeah, I'll put it on my porch," I say, "because it says 'welcome.'" Welcome to the home of a winner.

After the excitement dies down a bit and my neglected work tediously piles up, I discover that I can share the joy of winning by holding Frosty by his base and making him do a little jig, with his pinhead bouncing along the top of my co-workers' cubes: "Hello, Eryn! Happy New Year!" I say in a tiny falsetto. And "Hello, Susie, March will be here before you know it." The latter is something I say to Susie nearly every day, by way of making fun of her, but it was especially fun to say it in a Frosty voice. Susie is an insane college basketball fan. The mere mention of college basketball will make her spontaneously break into a cheer: Go 'Hawks! Woo-hoo! One day, like in September, she got a bad case of NCAA Tournament fever and wildly announced, "March will be here before you know it!" Yeah, hon, in just a mere six months.

Later, after I took frosty home, I put him on the floor and Mabel and Rupert (above) each gave him a few sniffs and licks. And I patted them on their heads and said, "That's right, no more blues. Mommy is a winner now!"

••••••

And in the spirit of holiday giving, I'll share a couple more seasonal joys:

Here are some gingerbread cookies that Erin and I made last weekend. Most are self-explanatory. The one with a "G" and the one with a yin and yang are for George. The penis is also for him because he's a dick (for never visiting me anymore).




And here is my Christmas tree. It's a big woolly Scotch pine that I got from a nursery after rejecting the scrawny saplings that the Luncheon Optimists were schlepping in the grocery store parking lot — for the same price! Oh brother. I'm all about charity, but I'm not going to spend the yuletide staring at some yucky diseased looking shrub so 10 cents out of my $35 can go toward buying some needy kid a pair of unattractive glasses. Please.