It seems there are ever fewer people in the United States who need a newspaper to inform them that they’re supposed to eat poultry with relatives on Thanksgiving, or to encourage them to go shopping the next day. They don't need to be told that Dec. 25 is the day to unwrap the presents under the tree, or that they’re supposed to get pie-eyed on champagne a week later as they coax a ball down from a tower.

Even if our internal calendars aren’t up to the task of keeping track of all these dates, legions of retailers spend the period roughly from Labor Day on jackhammering these dates into our heads. Bound by tradition, we newspaper folk can’t help but to add to this advertising blitz by devoting truckloads of newsprint to the same subject.

When I was a rookie reporter on one Connecticut newspaper’s business desk, I was asked to head down to a local mall the day after Thanksgiving. I was to write a story conveying a sense of the frenzied mobs scheduled to be storming the place right about then. The economists were predicting a banner retail season, and our advertisers, no doubt, would not have been displeased if we were to encourage people in the belief that this was a year for people to spend as if their reputations as dutiful consumers hung in the balance.

I won’t say it wasn’t busy at the mall when I visited. It was. But what I wrote — an honest appraisal — apparently didn't convey the sense of frenzy my higher-ups were after. They were thinking, Times Square on Millennium Eve. Valencia on Las Fallas. The Champs de Elysee, Aug. 19, 1944. Etc.

My version was more like the DMV at 10:30 on a Thursday morning.

After poring over the story for a second or two, my editor asked if I could make it "a little more dramatic, perhaps?"

I told him that's the way things had been when I visited the mall, and I wasn't about to change the story to say anything different.

But perhaps, my editor persisted, I could add a few details about how cars were prowling the parking lot, searching in vain for spaces. Or about the frantic crowds at the cash registers.

I replied that no mosh pits had formed at the checkout lines I'd observed, and there had, in fact, been parking spaces aplenty for any shoppers industrious enough to walk a few hundred feet to the entrance.

In the end, my editor ended up grabbing the story away from me and adding in details of a shopping frenzy like few others, cribbing details he'd seen reported with wide-eyed hystrionics on the TV news, accompanied by tightly-focused shots of flocks of shoppers. Judging by my editor's snarled commentary, my stock had dropped somewhat in the newsroom.

As I skulked, a more experienced reporter pulled me aside and offered the following advice, which I have carried with me ever since:

“Y’know,” he said, sotto voce, “sometimes when they ask for a blue dog, you just gotta find a dog and paint it blue.”

In this newsroom, as I mentioned earlier, the main challenge is simply keeping things fresh.

Last year around Thanksgiving I cranked out a story about what American Indians thought about the holiday, which they supposedly played such a key role in creating. (They view it about the same way your average Pole might view a holiday commemorating that country's "liberation" by Stalin.)

This year I’m hard pressed. Who knows, maybe a local PETA chapter will raid Gozzi’s Turkey Farm and bail me out.

So I put the question to you, dear reader: What can I write about the holidays that hasn’t been said already?