So how do we combat the extra tonnage that threatens to come aboard our midsection this holiday season like a ruthless band of Somali pirates boarding a cruise liner? If I knew the answer to that don’t you think I would have written a diet book and been on Oprah by now? I have no clue how to keep the weight off. I’m not even sure why we gain the weight during ThankChristmaYear. If you ask me, this time of year is when we engage in some of our most physically strenuous activities.

That’s in contrast to the summertime, when I personally try to spend as many weekends as possible sitting in a beach chair (preferably one that’s on a beach), drinking beer and eating salt and vinegar potato chips which, for the record, must be the strangest potato chip flavor ever conceived of in human history. What were the inventor’s rejected ideas? Salt and bleach chips? Salt and hydrochloric acid chips?

As you probably guessed, I can’t stand the taste of salt and vinegar chips. But at the same time, I can’t stop eating them once I start. It’s weird that way.

During the holidays I can’t think of a similar weird food such as salt and vinegar chips that most people universally hate but can’t stop eating. Unless they happen to be in a practicing fruitcake family, or live with orthodox mincemeat eaters.

I’m still skeptical about what mincemeat actually consists of. My fear is that it’s chopped up mouse. I base my fear on a cartoon I watched as a kid, “Klondike Kat.” In every episode Klondike warned his nemesis, Savoir-Faire (who happened to be a mouse and who would proclaim to be “everywhere”), that he, the Kat, would someday “make mincemeat out of that mouse.”

Disturbing, isn’t it? Especially for an eight year old boy when a guest shows up at the house carrying a mincemeat pie for dessert. You could put almost anything into a crust and call it a pie and I’d be happy, but I draw the line on ground mouse.

The point is, the cartoon “Klondike Kat” took the typical “Tom and Jerry” cat and mouse dichotomy and overlaid it with the inter-provincial struggles still playing out in Canada today between English- and French-speaking citizens. Although, I mostly liked the cartoon because Klondike was a cat dressed in a Royal Mounties uniform and Savoir-Faire wore a tiny wool hat.

As for the ThankChristmaYear Thirteen, I still think we are active enough to bring it closer to the ThankChristmaYear Three. The problem is we don’t benefit from the full calorie-burning effect of these activities because of one crucial oversight on our part: We don’t call it exercise. It’s a proven fact that unless something is labeled an exercise it provides little to no tangible health benefit.

So below is a list of activities we do every Christmas renamed in order to qualify as a heart healthy activity.