This week’s Tampa Bay Lightning fan poll: Distractification!

This season, Senior Columnist Clark Brooks will take the pulse of Raw Charge nation with a weekly poll about current or future events and non-happenings, for the sake of accomplishing not much, probably.

Christmas is the New York-based sports team (in any league) of holidays. It may not be the occasion you celebrate, or even have any interest in, but for better or worse, it utterly dominates the holiday landscape. Its omnipresence is so overwhelmingly omnipresent that everyone tends to lose focus on everything else, making it difficult to get other things done this time of year. Parties and shopping and travel plans throw everyone off-balance. As such, it can even distract us from what we’d rather be distracted by: hockey.

If only we could completely ignore these outside influences like cookies and gift wrap and ugly sweaters so we could concentrate better on the thing that helps us ignore outside influences like work and politics and bills!

My question this week is, what one aspect of the extravagant Christmas holiday season would you eliminate for the sake of being able to spend more time enjoying the (so far) extravagant Lightning hockey season? You only get to pick one because we’re all in this together, sucker.

As always, you’re cordially invited to share your hum-buggery in the comments.

Shopping and shopping and shopping26
Christmas movies, TV shows and pageants14
Eating and eating and eating4
Any and all renditions of “Baby It’s Cold Outside”11
Most of my relatives I don’t interact with the rest of the year19
Wacky FM radio show parodies of “12 Days Of Christmas”11
Most of my relatives. Period.25
Some other annoyance (please expound in the comments)10