Two Men's Medium Long-Sleeved Shirts!

I must confess: these did not come from this year's substantial Craptacular haul. I found them in a shirt box when I was wrapping my own paltry gifts to give to my family (oh, sure, I might be unemployed, but stint on the gifts to the family? Heaven forefend!). They were still in their box tucked among the empty shirt boxes and wrapping paper in the closet. I guess I meant to return them and just forgot.

I have nothing critical to say about the shirts or their packaging, which is minimal. All I can say is there was a brief era when Certain Family Members had a brain fart regarding the size my husband wears, and bought him mediums instead of large. I meant to return them, but back in those merry days I actually had a job and I did not have the time, and evidently forgot about them.

So here we got two perfectly good shirts, ready for the taking. The green one is a rayon/polyester blend and it's labeled "John Asford Adventure". The plaid one is cotton flannel, and it's a Claybrooke Outdoors. Appropriate gifts, since we're out here in the sticks and spend lots of time out in the woods, but they're too small. You can wear them if you like, assuming you wear a medium or you desire to rip through them when you secretly play The Incredible Hulk in the privacy of your own house. (Or in public, for that matter. Who am I to judge?) Or—and this is the solution I would recommend—you could regift them along with the Certificate of Craptacularity to someone who obviously isn't a medium as a delicious prank.

Warning for Stupid People: These shirts are loaded with straight pins. That's usually a sign of quality (cheesy shirt people can't be bothered with pins) but it means that they can and will bite you if you are not prepared to handle them properly. Speaking from the sad experience of someone who has bled a lot fairly recently (see my CSL auction for more details), I can attest it's awful hard to get blood off of or out of many things (except myself, where it seemed to come out real easy). So if you don't want to ruin the shirts or experience pain, don't stab yourself on the pins.

Another option, which I am somewhat loathe to suggest since it may reflect poorly on you, the buying public, is to buy these shirts and place them, along with their Certificate of Craptacularity, into a hermetically sealed archival bag and put them in a safe deposit box for, oh, say, twenty years. Then you can bring them out and get your picture taken for the local weekly paper, right next to the people showing off the oddly-shaped produce they've grown in their gardens. I can see the headline now: LOCAL IDIOT OWNS QUASI-FAMOUS SHIRTS with a picture of a dorkily-smiling You holding your original Certificate of Craptacularity.

In fact, if you send me the clipping,or a least a picture of you like that, it would TOTALLY make my day, and I promise I will scan it and publish it on my website (which will mean even less than the local advertising rag, but whaddaya want from me?). If you make it to the paper make sure you include the whole page—with all the other pictures of people posing with their vegetables and the local ads for Professional Stump Grinding—so we can all oooh and aaaaah over this heart-warming Local Boy Makes Good story.

For a nation that has grown cynical and snarky you will be an inspiration to us all. You'll become a symbol of a less complicated age, when people took pleasure in the little triumphs of life, like winning an Ebay auction. I'm getting choked up just thinking about it, so I will stop here.

Mojo's Holiday Craptacular....

"The Gifts that Keep on Being Given"

(dead poinsettia not included)