Evergreens, Where Would We Be Without Them?

Did you know that O'Hare airport and I-405 in LA are crowded at Thanksgiving time. ABC News decided this was the single most amazing fact of 11/23/16.

 

Without Evergreen, Barbra Streisand would have one less Grammy.

 

The 405 is gridlocked on a no-account Wednesday in July. What's different?

 

Evergreens cause way too many house fires this time of year. Get a fake Christmas tree.

 

Was just commenting on the copy desk today that I've run every single photo of Obama pardoning a turkey during his presidency. (We have early, mid-afternoon deadlines for the Thanksgiving Day paper)

And in the Christmas paper I'll probably run the AP story on how sketchy and violent modern-day Bethlehem is on the West Bank.

Our readers get out the same recipes, ornaments, etc every holiday season; why not give them the same stories?

 

And a membership in the jelly of the month club.

 

Poor people line up for meals on days other than Thanksgiving and Christmas.

 

Maybe painted pink.

 

I used to absolutely love the Thanksgiving Day paper for this very reason -- full of the odd stories that had been hanging around for weeks. It was like reading the Random News blogs that populated the Internet 2 decades later.

 

This just in: Lots of people are at malls today.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

 

Holiday papers were always a good time to run All-County or All-Area teams because you can get the majority of your pages done before time. We always did a defensive player, offensive player, player of the year plus the All-County team and spread it over several days. That meant the person on the desk could put together a few roundups, a story below the fold and the agate page and bail.

At my last stop before I left the newspaper business, we had to work on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, putting out two papers (we were an afternoon paper) for that day and Christmas Day. Since we had such early deadlines, you could do the papers back to back.

The news side is usually the bottom of the barrel leftovers on the AP wire, plus there are a lot of people packed at the malls to buy gifts they can't afford.

 

- Big, majestic... - Douglas firs.