Happy Post-Christmas Pre-New Year's Interval! We're still on the road, folks, and just checking in briefly to see if everyone had a nice Christmas. Even if you don't actually celebrate the holiday, that's no reason you couldn't have had a great day last Saturday. Now, having attempted to fly Comair, having checked luggage with US Airways, or having gone to see Fat Albert on opening day-- those are reasons you mightn't have had a great day last Saturday; if you managed to steer clear of those fates, though, you may well have had a jolly old time regardless of religious affiliation or Grinch Quotient, and we sincerely hope that you did.

Personally, our own Christmas turned out about a zillion times better than we had any right to expect it to, considering we transported an armed 10-megaton Human Tantrum Bomb (with a Stranger Anxiety hair trigger) roughly a thousand miles outside of her comfort zone and then chucked her into a room full of people she'd effectively never met; thanks largely to an extremely fortunately-timed nap, she managed to get through the entire day with nary a meltdown in sight, and a lovely time was had by all.

Except, of course, for the fact that she picked up a stomach bug from the virtual Petri dish known as the "family gathering," which mercifully let us finish up our idyllic Christmas sans crises before it gave us a Boxing Day experience that Anya may not remember, but that her parents will likely never forget. We'll spare you the details, other than to say that if you ever have toddlers of your own, a hotel room may not be the worst place to be when their digestive tracts go psycho, but lord, it sure ain't the best. (Prepare to tip the maid a lot, and if you can get to a washing machine, OxiClean is a parent's best friend.)

Anyway, Anya is now long past the worst of it, but since whatever this hideous affliction may be is currently working its way through the AtAT staff one by one, we'll make this quick so we don't have to try to be witty while our very organs attempt to flee our bodies by any orifice that's handy. In the spirit of good tidings and all that, we thought we'd share some happy news that faithful viewer Jesse Barnum passed along to us: according to an article in Hollywood Reporter, Amazon.com's record-breaking sales quarter hints at a little record-breaking in the offing by Apple, too: Amazon reports that its biggest-selling category during the Thanksgiving weekend was consumer electronics-- and that its top five consumer electronics products during the entire holiday season included three, count 'em, three Apple items.

Not that it's any particular surprise, of course, but Amazon's top-selling consumer electronics product this quarter was the entry-level 20 GB iPod. If that is a surprise to you, it's only because you're wondering what happened to the iPod mini; relax, the silver model took the silver medal, sliding into second place. Some Philips DVD player took third place (okay, it deserved to-- apparently the thing can play native Internet-downloaded DivX video files burned to CD/DVD without requiring that the files be transcoded to MPEG as VCDs or whatever, which really is pretty cool), but Apple was back in fourth with the $15 prepaid iTunes gift card before the Canon SD110 digital camera-- an updated version of our own beloved SD100, for which we paid over twice as much three years ago-- rounded out the Top Five.

So given that Apple made three of the best-selling items in one of the best-selling Internet retailer's best-selling category during said retailer's best-selling quarter ever, doesn't that sound an awful lot like Apple's going to have some seriously fantastic news to report come quarterly earnings time in a couple of weeks? It's just a guess, of course, but we're thinking that Santa might have one last belated gift in that big ol' red sack to deliver to AAPL shareholders next month. Here's hoping that Pete Oppenheimer opens Apple's earnings conference call with a booming "ho ho ho."

Now that we've got the happy news out of the way, pardon us while we go do unforgivable things to the hotel's plumbing and fixtures. And don't be surprised if you don't hear from us for a while...