The old year is ending, the new year is beginning, and this is how I’ve decided to mark the occasion. A penis joke. Yes, yes, my maturity knows no bounds. Let’s all either 1.) Party or 2.) Lay around the house all night and do absolutely nothing until the stroke of midnight.

Merry Christmas, everyone! (You can ignore that salutation if you don’t celebrate Christmas, or if you are offended by the word “Christmas” and prefer the word “Xmas,” or if you don’t like either word because one is clearly religious while the other is clearly pornographic, or if you just hate holidays in general.)

The December 2010 issue Defenestration is here. And by “here,” I literally mean here. As in right here. Or at least several lines below here, which is just as good. Or so I’m told.

This holiday season (Christmas, Hanukah or one of its various alternate spellings, Kwanzaa, Festivus, the 13th Feast of Shub Niggurath, Saint Radagast’s Day, and so on), give your friends and family the gift of Defenestration. This month’s issue is so good that you will feel compelled to print it off, wrap it up in fancy paper, and give it to everyone you know. Because the best kind of gift is the kind that’s easy on your wallet, and Defenestration is free, free, free.

I just want to go on record as saying the following: Christmas dinner should not be Thanksgiving dinner’s doppelganger. Shake things up a bit. My family, for example, has a spaghetti and lasagna feast. My neighbors roast a bear. A close friend of mine cooks up a big ol’ swarm of bees. And Winslow hollows out a turkey and makes his world famous clown stuffing, complete with rubber noses, balloons, tiny pies, and, somewhere toward the end of the meal, a car filled with several dozen more clowns.

Missing socks are a fact of life in my house, and when I’m not blaming cats or faeries or the tiny 18th century Spaniard that lives in my foyer closet, I suspect many of the socks sneak off in the dead of night to have torrid affairs with one another. This also explains the amount of baby socks I find around the house that I can’t recall either of my children ever wearing. This is sock biology at its finest.