It’s a… Family Tradition^H^H^H^H^H^H^H

I’m discovering that writing a blog can be interesting sometimes.  You see, unlike other people who write I tend to follow the site subtitle.  I’ve usually got several topics floating around in my head over the days between when I write a post.  When one of those ideas is mature enough I sit down to write it.  I carefully craft the first paragraph and start adding content to it.  Seven paragraphs later the post looks nothing like what I intended, covers ground that I hadn’t thought of before and is not one of the several ideas that I’ve been thinking about.

This morning someone sent me yet another Xmas greeting which triggered a post that I’ve been thinking about for a few days.  I wanted to talk about Christmas and what it means to me.  I wanted to discuss how I find "Xmas" offensive and why.  So, I sat down to write that post.  When I write, I set the title first to sort of define a "mission statement" for the post.  It helps keep me on topic.  Ok,  it did one time and I keep hoping for a repeat performance.   Today I started with a topic of "Merry Xmas".  I quickly decided that the core of what I wanted to talk about revolved around tradition so I changed the title to "Family Tradition".  That got me to thinking about the Hank Williams Jr. song, "It’s a Family Tradition" so off I go to find a video of that song to include with the post.  After about an hour of watching music videos I decided that the song, while it has a catchy title, is exactly the opposite of what I wanted to share.  This threw a curve into my thinking and I had to reevaluate what, exactly, "family tradition" really is which caused me to realize that the song actually conveys EXACTLY what I intended… Hank Williams Jr invokes that kind of thought? Good Lord. 

In the end, I cheated and wrote a blog post about writing a blog post which has nothing to do with Christmas OR Tradition… how the…

(the ^H part of the title is an old geek joke.  In the early days of computing accidentally hitting the delete key in the wrong place would generate a ^H character in your text.  This lead to people inserting ^H characters to be funny so you might have a string that looked like this, "That’s a stupid^H^H^H^H^H^H new way to look at things".)