Man, there ain’t no party like a Dirtburger party and a Dirtburger party ain’t fun.

At my house over the holidays, we spend most of our time trying to solve a two-part equation.  (1) Which kid pooped his pants/broke Uncle Fat Sandy’s vintage ashtray/stole a beer and (2) Who that kid belongs to.  Let’s just say we have some familial entanglements.

Ever wonder who gets excited when the cretins down the road teepee his front yard?  It’s the Dirtburgers.  As long as it doesn’t rain that night, we have teepee for a whole month.  Oh, and our garbage man gets excited, too.  You can’t flush newspaper with excrement smeared on it — Lord knows we’ve tried — you have to throw that sh*t away.

But the real disappointment this holiday season, besides the lack of presents and watching all my brothers hit on my wife, was the lack of a race to watch.  I mean racing of any kind.  Fat Sandy loves red and green, for sure, but he loves red and green best when there’s three yellows in between.

The only sporting event of any kind on Christmas was NBA basketball.  I HATE NBA basketball.

And I find it very difficult to believe that amid all the joy and reverence and waterskiing going on at Christmas Day at 43 very special houses in North Carolina — oops, and Arkansas, too — sorry, Mark Martin — that not one sumbitch would rather be racing.

Well, there was a Christmas miracle this year, and the name of that Christmas miracle is none other than Robby Gordon.  I didn’t know until Christmas that my neighbor even got the Travel Channel on TV, but when I stole his line in for a little look-see on Christmas Day, I started to get a little desperate and I ventured above channel 100 for the first time in a long, auspicious career of watching television.  There he was on channel 112, Robby Gordon in some kind of contraption that looked close enough to a truck to satisfy me, flying high in the air over some camels and sand dunes. 

I tell you, everything else melted away: the burnt Spam for Christmas dinner, the cops coming to take our Christmas Tree back to the First Methodists (how they know they were First is beyond me), Santa getting too drunk to wrap any presents on Christmas Eve and a bunch of fifteen-year-olds all sobbing about that.

It may sound strange coming from Fat Sandy, but some fellers in the Muslim world really made my Christmas this year.  To them, it was a day like any other, and they made it special for me by doin’ some racin’.

I’ve got to tell you, a tear came to my eye.  I don’t care if it was live or taped, but in my soaring heart it was HD.  For nearly an hour I watched Robby Gordon and all of those Arabian contraption-racers duke it out on the sandy hills of Africa.  The times they flashed on the screen didn’t mean a thing to me; all I cared was that they were posted — and that somewhere, in some land, someone cares a whole lot about being faster than someone else.  From Santa Claus getting down them chimneys to the Jehovah’s Witnesses trying to hit as many doors as they can before Satan gets to ‘em, that’s what Christmas is all about: Racing.

I hope you and yours had a happy holiday, and I sure hope you were able to witness the Travel Channel’s coverage of the Robby Gordon miracle that saved my spirit.

God bless us, every one!