We Wish You a Merry Christmas Without Us.

It’s December, the month of the year when school finals give way to Christmas vacation and a healthy dose of celebration. It is also a month when the average American will gain 15 pounds.

Do something for me? Run to the mirror and look at yourself. This is you at your current weight. Pretty good, no? I mean, we could all stand to fix a few aesthetic flaws, but you don’t look half bad. Now imagine what you will look like with an additional fifteen pounds hanging from the places pounds hang. Not all droopy like old people weight, but solid, firm and very there. That is what you will look like at the end of December.

A fun exercise this Christmas season is to walk down the street mentally adding weight to different people. Where would it go? How would the person try to cover it up? And know that if you are thinking it about others, others are thinking it about you.

We wouldn’t worry too much about all that weight. Come New Year, you will make a resolution to lose it all and you will have much of it worked off by the 23rd of January when you fail your resolution and go on a calorie binge that regains almost all of what you lost. Over the next few months, good lifestyle decisions bring you back to 90% of your former svelteness. That additional 10% will never be lost. Consider it a Christmas present. It will hang around and send out invitations until friends join it and an adipose party is on at your midriff. But that will take many years of Christmas seasons, so we wouldn’t worry about it too much.

Those of you who don’t plan on gaining weight should feel doubly guilty. 15 pounds is the average and if you add nothing, someone else will have to put on 30 pounds. Averages can be so brutal.

Anyway, while you all are gaining weight, we here at FCN will be...gaining weight. We will also be on vacation. That’s right, over the next four weeks, all the way until December 31^st, the FCN staff will be enjoying Christmas, recharging and doing everything other than posting FCN.

Don’t get us wrong. This isn’t a soul-searching, mid-life crisis, too much wampum kind of vacation. We aren’t taking time off to work on our yoga and eat yogurt in our Volvos (or should we say Priuses?) We won’t come back with a bunch of adopted refugee kids or melanoma inducing tans. We aren’t taking an extended, Vanessa Milanoesque voyage that ends only when the next one starts.

What we will do is leave FCN undisturbed for four weeks, punctuated only by whatever happens to seep out. And since our mental filters aren't very strong, you can pretty much count on something getting posted over the next month. But we're not committing to any regular content.

The FCN that greets you on the New Year is the same one that is leaving you now, plus 27 days and approximately 45 pounds. So go, eat your food and be merry. And come back when we do. Please?