The holidays are coming and while we love them, they come with a fair amount of stress. If you need your holiday sweetness tempered with reality, peppered with cleverness, and wrapped up in a burrito of hilarity, this post is your breakfast, lunch, and dinner. | Sisterhood of the Sensible Moms

Do you feel like the holidays are one raging whitewater current sweeping you up in October and dumping you onto the barren shore just south of New Year’s Eve? Or is it north of? Either way . . .

US TOO!

Picture us yelling that at you with a Charlie Brown style force sufficient to send you somersaulting backwards. Which reminds us, we need to dig out our copies of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Pronto. Oh wait, that’s what Netflix is for. Look at us, we just wiped one thing off of our to-do lists.

Anyway, what we really want to convey is that while we loooooovvve the holidays, they can be a bit overwhelming. And we’re thinking we aren’t alone. Doesn’t everyone’s festivities land somewhere between any Hallmark movie ever and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation?

So we’re here to commiserate with you and cheer you on. And (don’t kill us) add one more thing to your to-do list: Read Jen Mann’s witty book “Spending the Holidays with People I Want to Punch in the Throat: Yuletide Yahoos, Ho-Ho-Humblebraggers, and Other Seasonal Scourges.” If you need your holiday sweetness tempered with reality, peppered with cleverness, and wrapped up in a burrito of hilarity, this book is your breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

We tell you all about it in this podcast (player is at the bottom of the post). In fact this book served as a launching pad for recounting our own holiday stories of hijinx.

We’ll tell you about

The year Thanksgiving dinner came out of a blender.
Why “BOOM GOES THE TURKEY LEG” is Erin’s personal battle cry.
The Pilgrimages to Poland for mechanical Santas. (You can SEE what we are talking about here.)
The year Ellen buzzed through Christmas on her Jazzy.
And finally, the miracle that will whittle down your outside decorating efforts to locating one extension cord: Star Shower Laser Lights. Ellen gives you the highlights in the podcast, but since we know you will want one, you can get your own here on Amazon. See how it shows up even on Ellen’s brick house? Amazing. You can use the green setting during Halloween and the red and green setting for Christmas.