What have we come to, when the only people who insist on saying, “Merry Christmas”, are Jews like me? Well, Merry Christmas. Of course, we’ll be talking more before Christmas, but, still, isn’t that odd? When I was growing up, the local town council put up a creche every year in front of the train station, and every night, when my mother would take us down to pick up my dad, we saw the creche AND WERE COMFORTED BY IT, because it indicated that ninety-eight percent of the people in our world celebrated Christmas, and you know what?

It didn’t threaten or bother us in the least. Was I ever punched for being a Jew? Sure, but that’s fine with me, it just made me tougher. One thing did not relate to the other.

Oh, bother, as Pooh might say. Here’s the order, the imperative, the direction, the mandate for the next two weeks: Clean the garage.

We have two things this year, before New Year’s, that I am committed to do: clean the garage and paint the kids’ rooms. Is that too ambitious? They need painting, and I told them it’s the kind of thing a kid ought to do himself. Sure, we could hire someone to do it, but what does that accomplish? Any sane family ought to be able to spackle, sand and slap the colors on. Plus, one kid is a lunatic Red Sox fan, and one is a Yankee fan, and after we paint the basics, we told them they could sketch out the outlines of the logos and paint them in themselves.

PLUS: I told them, once we do all that, they can tell all their friends that they did the painting, and that will be a source of pride.

PLUS: Any girls they bring in, in a few years, will know they are in charge of their lives.

It reminds me of the time, as my mom told me, that her brother, Morris (all passed on now), had a girl in his room in their house on East 12th Street in Brooklyn (Flatbush), and she ran down to the kitchen to tell my grandmother, and shouted, “Mom, Morris is making out in his room with a girl!” And my grandmother, without even turning from the sink, said, “Let her mother worry about it.”

Three brothers, all in the army, one who has the best war stories I’ve ever heard — I’ll tell you sometime — and they all managed to grow up without taking anyone to court for getting into fights. One plumber, one artist, one decorator, two straight, one gay, all managed to serve and fight. Well, it’s okay if we examine these things more now.

But the garage is the thing.

I’ve already started, and I know the clutter in that garage is going to be like driving up to the Rocky Mountains from a hundred miles away: You keep getting closer, and you know you are from the odometer, but each time you look out the window the mountains don’t seem to be getting any closer.

That garage is my enemy, and only one of us will win. “Two men enter, one man leaves.” OR: One man enters, one garage gets emptied.

Why do we put all our things in the garage? I’m sure many other comedians and writers have remarked on this, but what is it about the garage that brings us all to heel, that grips all our things, that takes us all from excess to clutter to unusable, unlookable, unknowable garbage?

We have unopened, taped cartons from the day we moved in that are still sitting there and will never be opened. They’re time capsules, waiting for some graduate student in two thousand years to dig them up. “Hey, look, Kal-El, notepads with dancing cocktail glasses.”

Yeah, I use Superman’s name. Time to read to the boys. We read about his one, true love last night, Lyla, the time he went back in time and lost his powers on Krypton.

Be well, folks. Time to get ready for the blessings of work. (And P.G. Wodehouse.)

REMEMBER: IF YOU WALKED OUT OF BED TODAY, AND COULD STILL GET TO YOUR CAR IN THE GARAGE WITHOUT TRIPPING OVER STACKS OF LITTLE LEAGUE YEARBOOKS… FOLKS, THE GAME’S OVER, AND JEEVES IS ALL-KNOWING.