Time for some Christmas Which Oneing! Which One is the start of the Christmas holiday for you? Is it putting up the decorations, lights, etc the weekend after Thanksgiving or when you watch your 1st Christmas Holiday special (which started Monday before Turkey day this year when CBS ran Rudolph) with family?

Growing up it was ALWAYS mom pulling out the decorations from the storage room on Saturday and we as a family spent Sunday after church putting out and hanging up all the assorted red, green, gold, white, blue holiday adornments. Once that was done it began to smell alot like Christmas!

And no, August when the stores put out their aisles of decorations is NOT an option, nor is Christmas in July promotions or when the local radio station begins 24 hour Christmas music the Monday before Thanksgiving. 4 weeks of winter holiday cheer is more than enough. Thank you retailers who gotta drain every ounce of $$ from the season.

With my family, Christmas begins on Black Friday. We take down all of the fall decor from the house and put up all of the Christmas stuff, including the tree. My olde4 daughter is finally allowed to play Christmas music in the house without ear buds in (as well as sing them), and the younger one sets up the little chalkboard with "X Days Until Christmas" on it, which she is responsible for maintaining. Lights go up outside weather permitting, although since it is not an elaborate display, we sometimes do it later in the weekend or even into the next week.

When we experienced a power outage many years ago, we took the kids to a certain chicken restaurant for dinner, right at the start of December. When we came out, it was snowing! So we decided that henceforth, the holiday season would begin when we went back to that restaurant to have dinner together.

The problem is that it's not very good. My wife suggested going somewhere else many times, but the kids (now grown up) would insist that "No! It's a tradition!"

I suspect that since a new tradition came up a few years later (that of having sushi with my mother for her birthday, on 23 December), and that we kept it up in her memory after her passing, my wife may convince the kids to forego the chicken thing and to stick to the sushi tradition only. The boys' taste for french fries, chicken nuggets and big sundaes has abated somewhat anyway.

I was too old for that Heat Miser show, so I'll go for the Grinch song.

Now, had you included songs from "Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol," or even "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town," which for some reason I did see when it first came out, it would have been a much tighter race.

The Miser brothers, by a long shot. They're just too much...