It’s that time of year when the weather gets colder and the streets of the Garden District abound with twinkly lights and piney garlands. Mall parking lots overflow with honking horns and cranky customers.

Christmas season is approaching, but you don’t have to cruise the neighborhoods for decorations or drive to Elmwood to realize that. All you need to do is pay a quick visit to my new home – Monroe Library.

I moved in about a week ago, and I don’t go out very often – just the occasional trip to the Donnelley Center when I need Mac therapy. Sometimes I head over to the Rue on Oak Street to get my caffeine fix. And okay, I admit it: I snuck out to attend the Beggar Christmas Cocktail, too.

With December’s onslaught of projects and papers, I don’t have much choice. It’s either move into Monroe or risk moving back home with my parents. I think I’ll take the former.

So as I’m trying to squeeze a column in between an intensive PR plans book and an aesthetics paper, I realize that this is my last column for the semester. Evidently, I’m supposed to impart some profound final words to my devoted readership. At the same time, my mother has been hounding me for a Christmas list for almost two weeks. So in the spirit of finals, here we go:

All I want for Christmas is:

1. A well-paying internship that will provide me with experience and secure me a position in the future as a real job-holding adult. I’ve been told that without one, I will be back home with my parents.

2. A computer program that automatically saves everything I type, because I just accidentally closed this document and had to retype the entire thing.

3. The complete elimination of the show “Yo Momma” from MTV. I can’t seem to turn it off, and I can feel my valuable brain cells dying.

4. Extra-credit from all of my professors who recognize the academic value of my countless hours on Facebook. It’s like research practice.

5. A personal, 24-hour Kinko’s in my backyard that doesn’t charge 89 cents a page for color copies of a 183-page document.

6. A monkey who can eliminate the drunken hooligans who traipse past my bedroom window singing Justin Timberlake songs at the top of their lungs at all hours of the evening. I live on Freret, guys. And you can’t carry a tune.

7. The assurance that I can decorate the front of my house with Christmas lights without fear that they will suffer the same fate as my Halloween decorations at the hands of previously mentioned drunken hooligans.

8. A large bottle of liquor, granted to me from the Loyola administration on Dec. 15. Because after all my hard work, and spending all of my Christmas gift funds on the library’s coffee vendor, I think I deserve it.