Have you ever wondered what it is about the Holidays that are so appealing?

Oh sure, it's the time of year when our hearts swell with good cheer and the spirit of giving washes over us like acid rain. And of course, it's the time of year when the suicide rates climb faster than even our gravy intake. But where those things are certainly enough to make the Holiday season special, do you still ever ask yourself if there is more to the story? Are there other elements involved that make us giddy with excitement every year?

The answer of course is yes. There is definitely more to the enjoyment of the Holiday season than just the glad tidings and the open bars.

If it can be said that humans live sane lives for most of the calendar year, then it's not a far stretch to see the extra, hidden appeal of the Holiday season. For you see, we love the Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanza, New Years season because the Holidays provide us with a great opportunity to be insane. We just love being crazy.

And I don't mean crazy in the "put your family members into the wood chipper one-by-one" kind of way. I mean crazy in the "Daffy Duck, dive into the air from underwater and slap yourself with your own feet" kind of way.

Think about some of the things we do during the Holidays.

On Thanksgiving we eat a lot of food and drink a lot of booze. And we express our frustrations over how miserable our lives are . . . . Okay, so there's really nothing out of the ordinary that happens on Thanksgiving; except of course for the fact we do all these things in the company of people we normally can't stand to be around. Now that I think about it, I suppose that's where the booze comes into play.

But the things we do for the other Holidays are a different story. There's no way they can be construed as anything but silly.

We bring trees into homes that we work or pay people to keep clean for us, and we spread "snow" all over and around the thing. We hang our laundry above the fireplace. We drag a log in and celebrate it for 12 days. A log! What, are we descended from beavers or something?

We hang wreaths and garlands on our doors and use them as centerpieces on our dinner tables. We deck our halls with boughs of holly for lord knows what reason, and we dangle branches and twigs in front of unsuspecting houseguests as a means to potentially satisfy our overactive libidos.

We decorate the outsides of our homes and the trees and shrubs in the yard with modern amenities, like blinking electric lights, ceramic dolls, and plastic figurines. Some of us even have music playing on our lawns.

In short, we bring plants and foliage inside and take interior decorations outside. At what point in December do we slip into the Bizarro World? Me not know. Me think it normal to be backward.

And there's more.

We innocently ask our loved ones what gifts they would like, and then we wrap them up, like they're not going to know what we got them. They just asked for it!

Not only that, but we have the acting skills around the Holidays - which are known for gift-giving - to look surprised when we open a present we told someone we wanted!

We also eat and drink things we would never normally eat or drink. Who among us has ever had chestnuts on Mother's Day, or black-eyed peas in June for that matter? Or who has ever attended a summertime picnic and heard someone say, "Boy, I sure could go for a nice steaming cup of wassail right about now."? And who among us can claim they've ever walked into a sports bar during March Madness and ordered a frosty mug of eggnog?

By the way, are there other types of nog besides eggnog?

I know that Rinderpest.com's own Steven Brett once tried to market beefnog. But it never seemed to catch on. I guess Professor Steven's Fresh-Squeezed Beef Flavored Nog Drink just isn't what the cool people are into these days. Apparently it didn't have the same cachet as Red Bull or even castor oil.

At any rate, we also find it fun and amusing to walk around, knocking on strangers' front doors so we can sing songs to them. And no one seems to mind!

Can you imagine if I knocked on your door in the middle of spring and started singing "Ain't Love Grand"?

You'd sic the hounds on me, or Taser me in the nethers, or both before I could even get to the chorus. I'd be lying there flopping around on the ground in agony where your nativity scene stood only months before.

And for Holidays that are so much fun for kids and where young ones are such a big focus, we have no problem blatantly lying to our children. We tell them that animals and fat guys can fly without the assistance of a balloon, an airplane, or a rocket, and we convince them that the magic livestock and their jovial wrangler can visit every house in the world in one night. Not only that, but we get very upset when they somehow discover the truth. At what other time do we derive pleasure from lying to children, and should we really ever be upset when they learn something? Only in a crazy world, my friend. Only in a crazy world.

We strike fear into the kiddos about behaving, too. We tell them that if they don't act right, they're not going to get any goodies. That's yet another lie. We've probably already spent a month's salary on their gifts by the time that fib every crosses our lips, and we're way too soft to hold out on Junior when Christmas Eve rolls around.

If the lying and deception are not bad enough, we also dress the kiddies up in the loudest green and red sweaters ever conceived by man, and often put fuzzy, stuffed antlers on their heads just to satisfy grandma's cuteness jones. And as you know, old grandma has a pretty strong jones for cuteness. For most of the year, we hear cries of, "Won't somebody please think of the children". But around the Holidays, we have no qualms about totally messing with their little heads.

We're so nuts around the Holidays that we have no problem donning the exact same loud green and red sweaters and fake antlers for our office Holiday parties. These are settings where, on a normal basis, we must wear ties and professional dresses, and never under any circumstances, Xerox our asses and email copies to the CEO and the entire east region. Yet enter the Holiday season, and all bets are off.

The Holiday season is like an extended full moon. It's like a six week frat party or something. It's just insane.

But I suppose if we were to remove all the craziness from the Holiday season, it would just be another month and a half of gloomy fall and winter weather. No one would want to kill themselves from loneliness. We wouldn't have to clean any foliage out of our houses in January. We wouldn't get to experiment with strange diets, and odd customs. We wouldn't have to lie to our kids, and hope they don't discover our scams. And we'd save a year's worth of embarrassment at the office and a bundle of money on gifts and alcohol.

Overall, I think being loony during the Holidays is well worth it. And it seems a fine tradition indeed.

So I'll leave you all with this thought, and be extra cautious when I see any of you behind the wheel of a car:

Daffy Holidays everyone!

Daffy Holidays and a Wacky New Year!