That was a first

This year I decided to bite the bullet and buy an offical Honeybaked Ham for Christmas dinner. We've had imposters in the past, and while they were okay, for some reason I'm convinced that this one will be ambrosial. For what I paid, it had better be.

In order to procure this most crunchy of holiday entrees, I had to drive in the snow for half an hour, at which point I found out that the store was so busy they had police directing traffic for the parking lot. Like, half a dozen cops, with orange cones and "lot full" signs and the largest boom box I've seen in years blaring Christmas carols out into the scrum.

We managed to park at the restaurant next door, and I carried 40 pounds of sleeping preschooler across the icy unshoveled parking lot in 9-degree cold (with a wind chill in the negative teens) to wait in the cattle line they had set up inside the front door. Luckily, there were only a handful of people ahead of me, and they had - no kidding - eight people working to pull hams for customers, plus another four or five on cash registers, so we were out of there before Liza even woke up all the way. I still got to carry a 40-pound kid in one arm and a 10-pound ham in the other, all the way back across the ice.

And this was AFTER the $185 trip to the grocery store, when I purchased the heaviest load of groceries in recorded human history. Start off with a 25-pound bag of rock salt, five pounds of flour and a couple pounds of sugar, and it's all downhill from there. I think I was probably pushing 150 pounds of cart/kid/groceries by the time I got to the register. Let's not do that again, okay?