Today marks that wonderful month of Christmas & New Year's Eve, my favorite holidays of the year! It is both a month-long celebration and a time for strategy! I thought I'd whip up a list to rank my favorite Christmas movies of all-time, movies I watch each year:

1. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992) - There's just a delightful spirit of adventure and self-reliance, a kid version of Into the Wild.
2. Home Alone (1990) - Just the classic gateway to every Christmas season.
3. Elf (2003) - It's the Napoleon Dynamite of the Christmas genre.
4. It's a Wonderful Life (1947) - I'm a sucker for What-If analysis.
5. The Family Man (2000) - (see #4)
6. A Christmas Story (1983) - It has that delightful, Scrubs meets The Wonder Years vibe.
7. Daddy's Home 2 (2017) - Family hijinks and buffoonery abound!
8. Four Christmases (2008) - (see #7)
9. National Lampoon Christmas Vacation (1989) - (see #7)
10. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) - It's quirky and just gets the introvert.

That said, shouldn't The Hobbit trilogy be considered a Christmas favorite? I totally could just let that run on repeat 24-7 as ambiance—it TOTALLY makes me long for my beard! Hey, there's snow (I think), well, it comes off more Christmas to me than Die Hard or Harry Potter. Well, at any rate, 2023 will be the year of the fantasy beard. For now, it's just the summer 'stache to be shaved on the Eve of 2023.

I now am the owner of roughly 40 lbs of chicken wings in the freezer, at a price of $52 from Gordon's. If my numbers are right, it's the arms off of 92 chickens! Or, in practical terms, 368 what people qualify as "wings" (I do love a good Hot Ones episode). My 6-quart Instant Vortex meat drawer really shines when I lay 7 full wings into it for 22 minutes at 400.

As I welcome all the goodness that bacon brings in my life, I begin to recall the reason why I had to go in 2020. I do a good job at slipping the sugar bacon, which tends to dominate the marketplace. Right now, I have bacon from Costco an Aldi's cured with exactly the same ingredients:

• Walter
• Salt
• Sodium phosphate
• Sodium erythorbate
• Sodium nitrate

I'm wary of sodium erythorbate. Apparently, it's used to cure faster and keep the pink color. But, what bugs me is that it is made from sugar sources like beet, sugarcane and corn. And maybe I might let that one go, but when I hear that sodium erythorbate is similar to Vitamin C, that makes me stop in my tracks for "glucose and vitamin C have a near-identical molecular structure and share the same pathways when absorbed into cells. When glucose and vitamin C compete, glucose wins out" (link).

Is bacon out of my life? Oh, cherished lover! I need your your lovin' butter! Throw on some Four Tops, 'cause, "(Bacon), I need your lovin'! Got to have all your lovin'!"

I have about 6 lbs of bacon left, but I don't know if we can go on together beyond 12 days. And I would totally be on board with pork belly, something I feasted on last Sunday. But from a utility perspective, I don't save its oil from the bottom of my meat drawer...the curing process makes bacon magical! Perhaps there will come a time I'll cure my own pork belly—by crankin' out the crunches!

And if there was one takeaway from that earlier discussion between Kelly Hogan and Stephanie Person, I do need the fat. I might return to ribeye fat. I have cranked up my butter with my coffee, but now I'm only doing my 3-cup of coffee Reduce brand stein of a mug with ice once a day, where I'll add 4 tbsps of butter and a package of gelatin.

But, is a butter stick better than bacon?

And finally, today's album, Weezer's blue album, was something I first heard in fall '95, when a teammate handed over a pair of headphones in the back of somebody's mom's station wagon while we were en route to a wrestling match (against Memphis Catholic, I believe). That sing-a-long CD was a mainstay in college for my '86 Toyota Celica, my '89 Ford Mustang convertible and my '93 Chevy Silverado extended cab with the step sides with the 12 CD disc chamber (I miss that truck). While It had the distortion of the era, it felt more like "me" than Nirvana as I approached the threshold from high school to college.