I Hope Your Christmas is Better Than This Column

“What I don't like about office Christmas parties is looking for a job the next day.” -Phyllis Diller By Gordon Hopkins It's Christmas time again. That's means spending time with family and friends, worshiping and celebrating and eating and opening presents and listening to music and looking at Christmas lights and all kinds of good stuff.It also means I have to come up with yet another column about Christmas.Holidays are so great. Especially if you get those holidays off work or school. Holidays are less great when you work at a job that has to get done regardless of the holiday being celebrated.News reporting is one of those jobs. News doesn't stop because of the date on the calendar, so newspapers can't stop, either. Unfortunately, while newspapers don't stop for holidays, the Post Office most assuredly does.Life would be so much easier if Christmas fell on a Saturday. This year, Christmas falls on Wednesday. Right in the middle of the week. That happens to be the same day our paper publishes. Under normal circumstances, our printer prints the paper on Tuesday. A truck arrives in Fairbury early Wednesday morning. We unload the truck at the Post Office and diligent postal employees then take our newspaper to homes around the city, the county, the state and, yes, even around the country.So, this year, we are printing a day early and papers will be delivered to Fairbury a day early.Of course, if you are reading this column, then you must get the online edition of FJN and all this business of printing and delivering doesn't affect you in the slightest. So, why am I telling you this? Because I have to file a column every week and I gotta write about something, even if I can't think of anything interesting to write about, like now. I got hired by the Fairbury Journal-News in 2016. Not long after I started, I began writing a weekly column. That's almost nine years now and, in all that time, I haven't missed a single week. If fact, there was a period of time when I was writing my column twice a week. That means, to date, I've written something in the neighborhood of 500 columns.That's a lot, 500. At least, it seems like a lot to me. Somehow, I have managed to come up with something to write about every week about 500 times. While I have never missed a column, that is not to say every column has been published. I think there have been three times, possibly four, when my boss absolutely refused to run a column I wrote. Four out of 500? That not a bad track record, all things considered.I've been able to do it this long because I haven't limited myself to a specific topic. Some columnists write about politics (too many, if you ask me). Some write about culture. Some write about technology or the outdoors or television.I, on the other hand, write about whatever happens to catch my fancy. That should mean that I'll never run out of topics. On the other hand, that doesn't mean every topic is worth writing about.Which is why you ended up reading this.

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