Today is the day when columnists everywhere offer predictable Christmas Day essays. I decided to write something different, something profound and entirely original. (More)

Yeah, right.

Squirrels sometimes shop for groceries in humans’ gardens, but we don’t waste our time wandering in the open once a field has been picked clean. And that’s pretty much how it is for writing Christmas Day columns. Anything that can be written for a Christmas Day column has been written, and probably several times.

There are untold thousands of Ooey Gooey Warm Holiday Feelings essays about family and food and love and The Absolutely Perfect Gift. The kind of columns that have you reaching for tissue and hugging everyone as they get up.

There are also untold thousands of I’m Oh-So-Above It All essays dismissing the Ooey Gooey Warm Holiday Feelings columns as saccharine goop that should be poured over Christmas pancakes or used to test for diabetes.

There are Actually I’m Not A Christian essays, of two general varieties. The first is the But I Hope You Have A Wonderful Holiday Anyway essay. The second is the And Tomorrow Can We Stop Pretending You’re The Only Religion On Earth essay. Extremely clever columnists sometimes try to combine those. I don’t recommend that.

There are comic How Am I Going To Return All That Stuff Without Offending Anyone essays, not-so-comic Why Can’t Anyone Just Ask My Size Because XL Is Insulting essays, exasperated I Give Up On Assembling This Toy essays, and embarrassed I Asked My Five-Year-Old To Program My New Phone essays.

There are My Great-Grandmother’s Christmas Ham Recipe essays. There are I Found This Recipe Online And It Worked essays. And there are Please Don’t Ever Try That Recipe Again essays. That last group probably inspired the interminable and nonsensical song “MacArthur Park,” which is really better without any words:

That’s not exactly a holiday carol, unless you want to be really different. But every columnist wants to write a Christmas Day essay that’s different. I’ll bet some desperate columnist even wrote an essay with a recipe for reindeer stew, just to be different. Obnoxious, but different.

The fact is, there are no new Christmas Day columns to be written. No new words to be said. So, like “MacArthur Park,” maybe it’s better just to leave out the words:

Merry Christmas and Happy Squirrelidays to you and yours.

Good day and good nuts.