E. and I went and got a washing machine yesterday, for his mom, from a neighbor one town over. His mom gave us her truck and E. would not let me drive, because I tend to get distracted, which I think is such a lie because everything is shiny! Yay! What? Right. We toodled over there in the big, rattling pickup and pulled onto the neighbor lady's sidewalk, in front of her condo complex, to load up the big heavy motherfucker. And a very old man who apparently owns the sidewalk leaned out of his window and started shouting at us while we took off our coats to maneuver the big heavy motherfucker up onto the truck bed.

"Naaaagghhhnnnnn!" he said.

The best thing about this time of year is that Trader Joe's brings out a bunch of holiday-centric stuff that is so delicious, like sea salt caramels and incredibly chocolatey Belgian truffles, but the best thing on the shelves this season is its Candy Cane Joe Joe's. Their traditional Joe-Joe's are basically knock-off Oreo's but TJ's has taken the concept two steps further and infused the creamy center with crushed bits of candy cane. The resulting cookie is a symphony of that perfect burnt dark chocolate and the bright springy crunch of peppermint surrounded by snowy fields of white creamy goop. Why only once a year, TJ's? You're worse than the damned Girl Scouts!

Start stockpiling now, before they disappear!

Okay, after today, I'm officially two-thirds of the way to being a much better person! I feel like it's starting to stick, quite honestly, as these tips are getting absorbed sort of automatically into my day. I paid for another person behind me in the drive-up lane at Starbucks a few days ago, and gave a coworker a bottle of wine, just for the hell of it. Another coworker actually asked why I was sucking up to someone who was several paygrades under myself, and I shrugged and said that it was Christmas and I am trying to be a better person. And I didn't even say it sarcastically! This is a win, right? Onto day 20:

Dial a smile: A weekly call to an older relative can help assuage her loneliness. You may even get some sage advice! Got more time? Volunteer to record a senior's life story: Visit StoryCorps.net for conversation starters.

Aw, fuck.

Chances are, if you've had any downtime this month, you or someone you love has been addicted to the season's hottest game and been living your rock 'n roll fantasies (which don't involve snorting cocaine off of a stripper's ass). Thus, which of these rock gods is going to be titillating you with his finger work in bed? Which is going to be writing you a power ballad for your wedding day? Which one is getting the axe?

• Eddie Van Halen
• Slash
• Ted Nugent

The comments are waiting for you on the tour bus with a gaggle of groupies.

While Esteban and I were watching our second round of A Christmas Carol on Christmas Day (the first was the 1938 version with Leo G. Carroll as Marley's ghost, the second was the 1984 version with the awesome George C. Scott as Scrooge, who is second only to Jean Luc Picard's Scrooge in my book), I groaned audibly as the first of the diet commercials assaulted me. On Christmas Day! They couldn't even restrain themselves from starting the typical January onslaught early, they had to remind us how fat we are before some of the calories have even hit our lips? Come on, Kellogg's, I love your cereal to bits, but showing a woman having her ass mistaken for Santa by her own child on fucking Christmas Day? God bless us, every one!

In this particular commercial, they urge you to drink a whopping 5 grams of protein via Special K water, but whatevs. Wow, I can see that being an awesome boon for folks who are struggling to get enough protein (i.e. people who have recently had weight-loss surgery) but for the rest of us, we no longer have to even eat food at all! A replacement for a very small portion of protein, for only 30 calories and it tastes like Jell-O. Meh. This just heralds the beginning of a miasma of really bad dieting advice.

From my humble career as a dieter (granted, my résumé is far from successful, relying mostly on disordered or obsessive eating behaviors that resulted in my physique as it is today), I have found that the following just doesn't fucking work:

A week off seemed like such a long time a month ago, two weeks ago, last week, and now it’s Thursday, and I feel like I have no time left to do anything. That’s not true, of course—there are three days to go before the last holiday party of the holiday party season, and then there’s New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day, and then we are done, but it still feels like it is going so quickly, slip-sliding right between my fingers.

I had big plans for this break: I was going to go through all my bills, and organize my desk and the bookshelves next to the desk, where the overflow goes to languish. My closet...it’s a walk-in that you can’t really walk into, and something needs to be done about that. Nobody needs to keep notebooks from five or ten years ago, with mostly incomprehensible handwriting and arrows and scribbles and doodles. Most of them, I have no idea where they’re from, or what is in them.

We've been on a good roll for the last few days on the Self One-Month Makeover, and I think I'm starting to relax a little bit. Some of these tips, I do them anyway, so maybe I'm not automatically getting sent straight to a luxury suite on a high floor in Hell the way that I thought. Because really, I am an evil person at heart. If you doubt this, sit next to me during a party where the martinis are flowing and I'll quickly disprove your first impressions.

Spread the word: Don't let your latest favorite page-turner collect dust on a shelf. Toss it in a box with other beloved tomes and start a lending library at work. Add a sign-up sheet, and e-mail your colleagues, asking them to bring in their own books. Then get set for more scintillating watercooler conversation.

Okay, seems like a no brainer, right? Except it so isn't. This is way more tangled than the buying in bulk or baiting my friends with a party and then telling them I've donated to my pet charity in their name.

Tired of listening to a million versions of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer"? So are we. But with the old year almost done, it's easy to forget that there was some spectacular music in the last 12 months, some of which is going to be celebrated at the upcoming Grammies. Get reacquainted with those favs and find some new ones in our Grammy Primer Playlist, filled with rocking tunes that are all ready for the gym, the commute, or long car trips back home through the woods and over the river, as you make your escape from grandma's house and back to the sanity of your every day life.

For the first time in 8 years—probably longer than that, but I am pretty sure it is at the very least, and minimum, 8 years—I had a white Christmas. And while I am not one to let nostalgic, touching lyrics in schmaltzy holiday tunes dictate my life (for instance, I will never roast a chestnut on an open fire, because that is such a fire hazard, and role-playing games with snowmen are just weird), I have always very much loved, since I was little, the idea of the romantic white Christmas, and have always felt, secretly, that that is how it supposed to go. I would not turn down a chance to be lying on a beach in Aruba on Christmas eve, believe me. But deep in the most private recesses of my quietest heart, it would feel all wrong, and it would take many, many drinks in quite a number of coconuts, and maybe even some pineapples, to make everything right again.

Living in San Francisco is not the way to get yourself the kind of picture-perfect icicles-glistening, robins-bouncing-through-snowy-fields, Christmas-lights-blazing-through-fat-snowflakes, Yule-log-crackling-and-eggnog-heavily-spiked-while-snow-piles-up-against-the-windowpanes Christmas eves that you're looking for and, frankly, expect. It's never stopped me from expecting a Christmas miracle, and waking up to find that we can go sledding down Lombard Street and then retire home, stomping slush from our boots, to pour a bottle of Bailey's into our coffees and watch stop-motion holiday specials, both of which are extremely warming to both the heart and the soul.

For Christmas this year, my aunt gave everyone a collage of old pictures of our family. Mine has pictures of my grandmother, my great-grandmother, my mother, her sisters, myself and my siblings—all snaps of time over the last five decades. One of the pictures was taken on the day of my great uncle's funeral. They were taking posed photos, since relatives were there from near and far. This one, I assume, was supposed to be of my great-grandmother and her two surviving children, but for inexplicable reasons, they called me into the shot, maybe because it was common knowledge that I had been Great Uncle Roger's favorite niece.

It's a strange picture for me to see because I remember it being taken, remember looking at the tableau that is behind the camera. My slender mother is standing just out of camera range, next to my stepfather and her very weight-conscious sisters who were coaching the subjects while my great-grandfather snapped away. My uncle's kids, who are very cool and beautiful and have exotic Texas accents (even though they grew up in Wisconsin, which is a very perplexing mystery and allowed me to imagine that there is hope for me yet) are also there, watching from the sidelines, waiting for their own posed photos. My great grandmother is staring just behind the shoulder of the photographer, my surviving Great Uncle is looking there too, shooting is beaming his Hollywood smile. I called him my Rockford Files uncle (and my Uncle Roger was my Hugs and Kisses Uncle, until he got sick and couldn't touch anyone because of germs) and my grandmother looks off to her right, where her daughters were sitting.