A while ago, my wife and I had gone to the mall. Usually when we go to the mall, we shop for a little while and stop for something to eat and then we shop some more.

A few weeks ago in this column, I lamented the loss of the Sears Wish Book. A lot of you were kind enough to share your memories of the Wish Book and my wife and I shared a few hours looking at them online. If you have been following the news in the last few days, you will have noticed that Sears has passed its time on life support and is likely to start liquidation proceedings in the next few weeks. I'm not going to bore you with the numbers and statistics or even a brief history of Sears. That stuff can be read in the real news. 

It's no great secret that I have a social media presence. A lot of you have seen the “Joe Weaver, Columnist” Facebook page. I also have a personal Facebook page for my friends and family. 

Way back when, in a waterfront neighborhood in Baltimore, I was a young man hanging out with his buddies and such, bouncing from bar to bar and having a good time. We were wild and loose, a tight-knit bunch of folks, regulars in one bar or another. We knew the bartenders and the servers and we could run a tab in our “home bar” and get discounts in the others.

(Note: This column was originally published in 2015 and the author has requested it run every year around Christmastime.)

I’d like to take a small survey of the readers of this column. It’s a simple question. How many of you believe in Santa Claus?

It's beginning to be that time of the year when all the big news outlets parade out their flashy year-end reviews. You know, the one that fills up about five whole minutes of a half-hour news broadcast in that dead time after the sports segment where they usually put in a video of a raccoon playing jai alai or some feel-good story about an old lady who knits lingerie for seniors. 

It is the time of year that brings a fond remembrance for folks of my generation and those from the generations slightly before. When we were younger, we were not blessed with the internet. We had no Amazon or eBay from which to compile our list of Christmas wants and wishes. My brother and I would fight to see who could pick out what we wanted from Santa Claus. We would wrestle that great book from each others hands and go page by page, methodically creating our Christmas list. The book I am talking about is the Sears Christmas Wish Book.

I know this is probably going to result in a “well, duh!” moment from a lot of you. I guess it's time for me to finally accept my title of Master Of The Obvious, and I will gladly do so. I'm okay with that, so I figured I would cut off the inevitable comments at the proverbial pass. What, you ask, may I be thinking that is so obvious? Well, I have drawn out the suspense as long as I could, and as long as I could get away with padding the first paragraph of this column with nonsense without you noticing. I am convinced that fast-food giants are trying to kill us. See? I told you it would be obvious.