Today, I turn 44 years old.

I’ve already got two big birthday presents. The first is that today is the first day after the last day I have to drive my Firstborn to school this year. (Yay! School’s out!) It’s the changing of the season, which always excites me.

The other big birthday present I got is a small wad of cash someone hid in one of my birthday cards. And I’m going to use it to buy a new hard drive for this laptop I’m typing on, because it was running slow, and so I ran a self-test on the drive last night and discovered that it’s on the verge of failing. (Sheesh!)

But I would love more birthday presents!

The biggest gift you could give me, frankly, would be to post a short review of one (or both) of my inspirational ebooks:

The Most Important Lesson I Learned This Christmas

Give the gift you would most like to have for the Yankee Swap. That way, when you get stuck with it at the end, you won’t be so disappointed.

If You Forgot to Get Holiday Gifts for Your Favorite Authors...

Actually, the coolest gift I got this Christmas was from my brother, a set of red-wine glasses. No, not red-wine-colored glasses that distort everything you see so that you think you’re drunk. But rather wine goblets, stemware, specifically designed for drinking red wine out of them. It was exactly what I wanted!

I’m not a wine snob. Really. I’m only a wannabe wine snob.

Now, you might not think that it matters what you drink red wine out of. After all a glass is a glass, right? Anything more is just for decoration. But you would be incorrect. You might think that those beautiful white wine glasses that a friend gave me years ago, they’d be just as useful to drink red wine out of. But that wouldn’t be quite right. You might think that the generic cheapo wine glass that I’ve been drinking my red wine out of, the only one left that hasn’t been knocked off the counter and shattered into a million pieces, that I wouldn’t be able to tell one bit of difference whether I used that old glass or one of these new goblets. But if you were to see a good wine poured into this crystal chalice, if you were to inhale as its delicate walls funneled the bouquet toward your longing olfactory organs, if you…

I’m sorry. I forgot where I was going with that.

It’s the day after Christmas (or close enough, anyhow). And you know what that means: Everyone breathes a sigh of relief that Uncle Albert is on his way home for another year. No, seriously, it means we all return all the gifts that we didn’t actually want. Except that I didn’t get any of those, or at least none that I’ll return.

We all scaled down the holiday a bunch this year—and will probably even further next year—except for my little niece, who played the social butterfly and chatted everyone’s ear off between laments of “I wish I had more presents.” My sister-in-law and I tried to explain to her that part of the fun of Christmas is seeing our family open their presents, too. I don’t know whether she got it, but I have faith that someday, she will.

I got a couple of books— What else?