I don’t get the 12 days of Christmas so I looked it up.

Albeit I looked it up on Wikipedia, which should never be a reliable source of information although for trivial information that’s where I go first.

The thing about the 12 days of Christmas is it’s about the 12 days after Christmas in the United Kingdom and not the 12 days before Christmas in Roanoke Rapids.

With all that said I’m embarking on the 12 Columns of Christmas series that begins today and ends with the traditional Yes, Virginia, editorial because it’s a classic.

It may be the newspaper industry’s most shining editorial with the exception of some of my columns on socks.

I decided to do this to help me get in the Christmas spirit. I find the numerous Black Friday and Cyber Monday ads that began soon after Halloween wore me down to where I think of Christmas as another day where people exchange junk with one another and then exchange it at a store for cash or for junk they like better.

I’m still trying to reckon in my feeble mind where a day where kids dress up like characters I’ve never even heard of has slowly become the official start of the Christmas season.

One day I’m going to wake up with gunpowder burns on my face from the Fourth of July and hear a Black Friday ad. That will be the end of Christmas, as I know it. I guess that’s too late because I hear now and then of Christmas in July sales. If Christmas were in July I just wouldn’t celebrate because it’s too hot and all the presents you get from Santa would be soaked with his and reindeer sweat.

Maybe every day should just be Christmas but then we’ll be bombarded with Black Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday ads and I’ll just go insane.

I think my fondest Christmas memories were when we put up the tree two or three days before Christmas and my mom threw it out the day after. I don’t think there was such a thing as Black Friday then. Maybe there was and I just didn’t know it. I think it was called after Thanksgiving Day sales, which sounds much nicer.

I’m an early riser but shopping is never on my mind when I wake up early and if one day I’m up at 3 a.m. to go buy a television, please commit me. I don’t think I would get up at 3 a.m. if I knew a Faberge Egg was being discounted to $2.99. It’s not that much of an incentive to risk bodily harm from people rabid with desire to save a couple of hundred bucks on a toaster oven. If I want a good fight story, I’ll just contact my police sources.

It’s sad I feel this way and really the only thing I enjoy about Christmas is giving. The thing is, I don’t need Target, Sears or whoever to entice me to get up before dawn to buy stuff.

This doesn’t explain the whole 12 Columns of Christmas thing and there’s not much to explain, just something I want to do to hopefully help me get in the spirit of things.

This I do promise, not all the columns will be Christmas bashing. Some of them will be fun and I hope some of them will shed pathos, love and inspiration.

I think pathos; love and inspiration get lost this time of year when someone’s screaming for you to get up at 3 a.m. to go shopping and they really get lost the rest of the year, especially after Halloween when the first Christmas trees go up in stores.

With that said, you’ve just witnessed the first column of Christmas and it will get better, sometimes worse from here — Lance Martin