Easily the best part of Christmas vacation is reading the paper at one of your relative’s houses (because you can’t afford a newspaper subscription; are you kidding me? Those things are like $300 a year!). It’s particularly delightful this time of year because all of the journalists get to write at least one ridiculous “wacky holiday tradition” article stuffed to the eyebrows with wonderfully bad puns.

This year, the LA Times chose rightly to cover the Possum Drop. You already know the specifics of the story, even if you have never heard them before: a colorful local character annually irritates possums in honor of the holiday season. A bunch of coastal elites take issue with him. He laconically declines to be bothered by this, and makes a great number of roadkill-themed puns in the process.

Logan strokes his whiskers, deep in thought. He’s perched beside a wood stove in the back room at Clay’s Corner, a country store with a wooden possum hanging out front and a sign that reads, “Opossum Capital of the World.”

Logan has just inspected a shipment of this year’s Possum Drop T-shirts, inscribed with the message: “The Zone of Lawlessness — Clay’s Corner.” He’s still wearing last year’s shirt: “Possum, the Other Other White Meat.”

Finally, Logan speaks: “Oh, we’re gonna have a Possum Drop this year.”

Without ever having met the man, I can picture in perfect detail exactly how he delivered that sentence. The cadence, the emphasis, the drawl — my mind palace is exclusively filled with Clay Logan declaiming his possum plans.

“That box is a government-approved possum motel,” Logan says, admiring his blue plexiglass creation, which features air holes and images of an American flag and a possum’s belly. “Next thing you know, they’ll be making me put in a TV for him.”

It’s a slippery slope. All this fuss for a possum. Nothing brings me more joy than hearing what someone thinks is the next step in a dangerous process. An older gentleman this week told me that “Nowadays, men don’t know if they should even offer to help a girl with luggage,” and I wanted nothing more than to sit at his feet and listen to what else he thought men didn’t know they should do, in these troubled times.

Jones’ partner, Britt Solomon, says, “The possum never had it so good.”

“They’re being totally ludicrous,” says Rebecca Jacob, who shops at Clay’s Corner. “There are lots more important things to worry about in this world besides lowering a possum a few feet.”

Every quote in this story is pure gold. This is several orders of magnitude better than Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.

The opossums are subjected to “capture myopathy,” Kerr says, a condition he says can kill the animals. Logan’s opossums probably die shortly after being released, according to Kerr.

Informed of Kerr’s comments, Logan shrugs. “That’s his opinion,” he says.

Humanity has been in existence for hundreds of thousands of years and we have yet to come up with a more thoroughly humiliating dismissal than “That’s your opinion.”

In his back room, Logan is sharing beans and cornbread with the sheriffs of Clay and adjoining Cherokee counties, whose deputies unsnarl traffic jams during Possum Drops. These lawmen have no dog, or opossum, in this fight. But they do joke about lowering a retiring chief deputy named Melvin this Dec. 31 if the whole opossum thing doesn’t work out.

Normally, I would not find the mental image of a man facing a lawsuit cozily sharing a meal with local law enforcement in the American South comforting, but in this instance, I have no objection. I hope that possum gets dropped majestically this year.