{"id":56369,"date":"2023-12-25T00:02:42","date_gmt":"2023-12-25T00:02:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=56369"},"modified":"2023-12-25T00:02:42","modified_gmt":"2023-12-25T00:02:42","slug":"merry-christmas-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=56369","title":{"rendered":"Merry Christmas &#8230; whoever you are"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"twitter-share\"><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?via=jkanelis\" class=\"twitter-share-button\">Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n<p>Occasionally, you meet someone on a very casual basis and you recall them, even if it isn&#8217;t necessarily with fondness.<\/p>\n<p>So it was for me today as I ventured into our local Wal-Mart store in Princeton, Texas.<\/p>\n<p>I burrowed through the crowd to pick up a couple of items I would need to take tomorrow morning to see my son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter. All the manned checkout stations had lengthy lines of customers; and all the stations had staffers working them.<\/p>\n<p>So &#8230; I lined up at the end of the long line waiting to check my own groceries. I had only about four items. Hey, no sweat. The guy in front of me was bitching up a storm about the length of the line.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s weird to take 15 minutes to find your stuff and then take two hours just to check out,&#8221; he grumbled. &#8220;I should have gone over to Farmersville, to Brookshire&#8217;s,&#8221; he said. I told him all the manned check-out stands here were up and running. He didn&#8217;t believe me. I also reminded him that Brookshire&#8217;s likely was a madhouse, too.<\/p>\n<p>Good-humor guy that I am, I kept laughing, partly to keep my own frustrations subdued, but also at this dude&#8217;s constant carping. I tried to remind him that if he had done this shopping <em>a day or two<\/em> earlier he wouldn&#8217;t have faced this madness. He was too busy griping to hear what I said.<\/p>\n<p>The lengthy line was moving rapidly toward the front. He yammered and blathered every step of the way.<\/p>\n<p>Then &#8230; presto! Before he and I could catch our breath, he proceeded to an empty self check-out machine. Then he was gone.The time it took for him to leave the store from the time I sidled in behind him? Oh &#8230; maybe 10 minutes.<\/p>\n<p>The time in line flew by mainly because I was so enthralled by this guy&#8217;s frustration, I paid no attention to the massive crowd inside the store.<\/p>\n<p>Then I was gone, heading for my house around the corner and down the street.<\/p>\n<p>So, to this Grinchy-like dude, I want to offer him &#8212; wherever he is &#8212; a Merry Christmas.<\/p>\n<p>And to you as well.<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"twitter-share\"><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?via=jkanelis\" class=\"twitter-share-button\">Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Occasionally, you meet someone on a very casual basis and you recall them, even if it isn&#8217;t necessarily with fondness. So it was for me today as I ventured into our local Wal-Mart store in Princeton, Texas. I burrowed through the crowd to pick up a couple of items I would need to take tomorrow &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=56369\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Merry Christmas &#8230; whoever you are<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[978,8242,9915],"class_list":["post-56369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-christmas","tag-christmas-eve","tag-princeton-texas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56369"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56369\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56371,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56369\/revisions\/56371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}