When is it too early to start your Christmas Shopping? Holidays are tough in prison. Christmas is probably the hardest one to try and ignore since it is splashed all over all mediums of media. Television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and most prisons and jails do something to let you know Christmas is coming.

It is always disheartening to see that first commercial on TV selling some incredibly useless thing for Christmas, knowing that once there is one, there is going to be more and more and more.

I have not watched any television since I have arrived at my current undisclosed secure location, and no, I have not seen Dick Chaney. I was not thinking about Christmas at all, but I came across something in the New York Times that managed to break the record for letting me know it was never too early to think about Christmas 2005.

No this was not just a little tiny mention, but a full page, in living color, advertisement for the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular. The advertisement appeared on April 17, 2005. The Spectacular opens with its first performance on November 3 and continues through January 2, 2006. One possible use for this as was that it does let me know that Christmas is on a Sunday this year.

We now return you to thoughts of spring flowers and summer vacations.  ¶ 10:59 AM