This is a collection of 27 short pieces, written over the past half dozen years. Many of them are from the booklets I had printed locally to use as Christmas presents. (Writing, for me, is more fun than shopping.) Several of the selections are new and have not appeared anywhere yet. One of them is technically an essay, rather than fiction, and another shades into a kind of loose memoir. Most are short stories of one sort or another, weird, crazy, demented, philosophical, softly romantic, brutally realistic, grim, touchingly upbeat, and are populated by characters who strive, despair, fear, exult, manipulate, develop, reminisce, wonder, and otherwise experience life.