By Corey McMickle

The chaos is swarming around us now.

The gifts are awaiting shelter under our trees, the stockings are just hanging around and I’m in awe of how fast my wife can churn out an excuse on why we have yet to have a day where there hasn’t been a package in the mail or waiting for us on the doorstep for the past two weeks. Pretty soon I’ll be in front of some well-established business ringing my own bell with a small bucket asking for donations.

I found myself reminiscing quite a lot this year, thinking of my Christmas years prior to becoming a father. To be honest, you can bundle all the times I snuck into our living room to do a little espionage on what I was going to be unwrapping in a few hours, all the times we’d go for a car ride to see some assortment of Christmas lights, and all the times I got the chance to give gifts for any particular person… and you couldn’t even come close to how special this Christmas has been to me so far. Shopping for my daughter the other afternoon and thinking of what her face will look like when she gets that particular gift has just sent me back to a childlike state, waiting and counting on the days for that special day to finally get here. I see why my wife gets some much joy out of buying some much for our little maiden now.

While strolling through the aisles of my memory I think about all the wasted attempts for joy I placed in gifts that didn’t last any time. I remember getting the best out of a go-cart after no more than a few months, only to see it rot under a tarp till this day. I remember asking for a ton of supplements one year. One was a protein powder that was supposed to be of the finest quality and of the highest purest. It was pure alright, a pure waste of the wrapping paper it was in.

The supplement business is a 25 billion dollar hoax. Supplementation is an over the counter attempt to do nothing more than pray on the self-inflicted imperfections you have with yourself. Don’t believe me? Look up weight loss pills, they’re there. Search energy bars or powders, they have you covered. There was a lip balm I saw one time that advertised “You won’t believe the testosterone boost you’ll experience!” Get real.

“But they’re full of protein and amino acids and vitamins!” Yeah, you know what else has these important properties? Food! If you’re eating a healthy mixture of fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, meats, etc., you will never have the need to adopt any of these extra practices this one company’s product proclaims. Healthy eating not only provides these essential nutritional keys but they provide them in the complex way that are meant to be absorbed by our bodies and won’t hinder any of our natural balances within our precious bodies.

Let’s say you ate a delicious, fist sized, orange today. They’re rich in vitamin C. You’ll almost certainly get your daily intake of that vitamin just from that one orange, yet you scarf down a multivitamin containing three times you’re daily intake for vitamin c that night… I like to think of that old saying, “a little rain never hurt anyone, but too much can kill you.”

Ditch the lies, Port City.