Christmas Eve is a particularly holy night for my family. An Austrian priest, Joseph Mohr, penned a poem exploiting my family’s tradition of the “Silent Night.” As the title suggests, no one is allowed to speak or make any noise, without facing the bitter taste of the switch. The satisfaction we all got when someone accidentally spoke and was switched is still one of the greatest memories of my childhood.

Our Christmas day traditions are pretty mainstream. We wake up early to exchange small, handmade wooden presents and to slaughter our dinner—the Christmas goat. And of course, if a Schrute has been particularly good that year, then Kris Von Kindl fills his stockings with coal, a highly desired source of fuel during long, cold Pennsylvania winters.

And since our Christmas festivities are so much fun, we carry them on for another day, which we call, “Boxing Day.” In between feasting and personal meditation, the day is spent engaging in fierce hand-to-hand combat with our loved ones. Unresolved familial issues that have crept up over the course of the year get settled once and for.

Thus, after three gruelingly delightful days spent internalizing the Christmas virtues (love, obedience, and endurance), our family is ready to ring in the New Year with the true Christmas spirit etched into the musculature of our hearts.

May you and yours have the best of battles this holiday season,

Dwight K. Schrute.

We were completing our weekly militia training (which we see as fulfilling an American duty) in the woods. While doing our usual rife drills, I instinctively missed the target (a scarecrow dressed as Sean Penn). My bullet ricocheted off a tree in the woods with an alarming “ding.” In an instant Mose and I were on the ground with our rifles pointed. We cautiously crawled toward the tree for inspection. It looked like this:

Initially we thought it was a camouflaged nuclear anthrax rocket, or anthrax rocket with a conventional warhead, or, perhaps, most disturbingly, an actual metal tree. But after hours of poking it with a stick and throwing rocks at it, it became obvious that it was a device used to spy on me. Clearly the work of the Russians, Russian Separatists, Al Qaeda, Jim, We Got the Beets (a rival beet supplier), or some combination thereof.

Ever since I checked out Harriet the Spy from the library for Mose, I’ve suspected that I was under surveillance. After dark, Mose and I crept into the woods and took down the tree. Breaking through the surrounding wires and cement was not an easy task, in part because Mose digs with his hands and teeth.

The following day, the police blotter of the local paper listed a report that someone had vandalized an artificial tree that served as a cellular phone company antenna. Since wireless providers have 128,000 antennas made to look like trees across the country, this seemed plausible. A little too plausible if you ask me. Thus further investigation will continue.

Unfortunately, humanity seems to lack the backbone to demand that the elderly continue to contribute until they terminate. Instead we both indulge their laziness and demean them, locking them away in retirement homes while they slowly rot in a medicated stupor. The thought seems to be, the elderly, like most minority groups, enjoy being grouped together in a designated living area. But what if we stripped them of their pills and deprived them of their Rascal scooters, perhaps the elderly would stand up and face death like a man: head on, in a battle royal. Win or lose, they’d be more alive than they are now, even if the exertion caused them to cease living.

I’m proposing we take all the seemingly washed-up old geezers sucking at society’s teat like wrinkled old leaches and put them on some remote island. There, they would compete for survival in a format not un-like the popular television program Survivor, only there would be no challenge rewards, medical assistance, or immunity. Just old men and women working together to battle time and Mother Nature, reliving their glory days in some treacherous tropical paradise.

Some would surely die, many immediately, but at least they would die with dignity. Plus there would be those that rise to the occasion—that fight and triumph against the odds. They would of course be welcomed back to our youthful society as conquering heroes, free to live out their days however they see fit. I only pray that if my body ever shows any signs of corrosion, that I’m given such an opportunity. There’s no way I’m going out like old Stoffel, annoying my relatives as I slowly expire. Better to die living my life with honor: sabotaging my opponents, crushing my competition, and surviving no matter what the costs.

What the zoning officer fails to understand is that I come from a long line of moat diggers. It was my ancestors that constructed the moat surrounding Heinzburg Castle, which was the toast of Bavaria until the castle sank with the queen in it. And it was my uncle, Barnabas Schrute, that dug the first moat in Honesdale. I’m proud to say four trespassers have died in it and counting. Moat digging is in my blood, so it troubles me that a zoning officer with no history of moat engineering can decide whether or not I am allowed to build a moat. What does he care anyway? Should anyone drown in the moat I’ll be the one held accountable. Mose knows how to perform CPR and, if need be, how to embalm a body. If something happens to any of the guests staying at the bed & breakfast we’re legally covered; at check-in they’re required to sign a 33 page waiver. I am a responsible land owner and moat digger, so I take great offense to a system that allows a loser like Mr. Hegarty to compromise my property rights by telling me what I can and cannot build. If the house collapses into the moat and we all die it’s my problem not Dale’s - and it’s my right to have that problem. I think the zoning officer is just jealous because he doesn’t even own the land his house is on. Well, screw you Dale! Your wife’s fat and your barn sucks!

My swimming lessons were simultaneously extensive and short-lived. I was eight years old, which is the age all Schrutes begin their aqua-training. From the very moment I was thrown into the center of the swimming hole, I knew that I was not meant to be a swimmer. As with all things for Schrute children, however, I had no choice in the matter. My father took on the role of swim instructor and began teaching me. I hated every second of it except for the fact that it was the first occasion I had ever spent time alone with Father.

Ever since then, I have not stepped foot in a swimming area of any sort – be it pool, hole, or anything else. Yes, I was accidentally driven into a lake once, but that was not my choice. Being a hero that day was also not my choice, but I accept it for what it is.

I don’t know exactly what it is about swimming that I dislike so much. I believe it has something to do with the fact that I was often left in the bathtub in my youth and forgotten about. The terrible memories of my skin wrinkling until it could wrinkle no more are enough to make me avoid any large collection of water. Other than that, I think there are more issues at play. For most of my life, family members have told me that I quite resemble Great Cousin Cordula, especially in the mouth area. Her lips were apparently very admirable. Sometimes, Grandmutter would say that she can sense a little bit of Cordula in me and I think I’ve always been afraid that she was right. If Cordula’s spirit is in me, I have subconsciously believed that I could befall the same fate as her. This is all a stupid psycho-babble way of saying that I don’t swim because I don’t want to die.

So now, the only time I spend at Schrute Hole is when Mose wants to go swimming. I dutifully stand by as his lifeguard, because, in truth, Mose is my favorite companion at home and I would hate to see him die a terrible soggy death. It is the image of Mose drowning in that murky water that makes me such a vigilant, amazing lifeguard.

Today you have seen into the darkest places of my heart. Don’t think that this will become a regular occurrence.

Yours in Text,
Dwight K. Schrute

We are in the thick of summer, people. The sun, while a huge ally of the Earth, also serves as one of our biggest enemies. It provides light that we use to see, but it can also scorch your skin into a red blistering mess. There are so many heat-related illnesses that it’s almost impossible to name them all: heatstroke, heat rash, heat cramps, heat exhaustion, heat edema, heat tetany, heat syncope, heat mumps. The list goes on and on. The sun lurks silently in the sky, waiting to claim its next human victim and it’s up to us to stop it.

In the wintertime, nobody bothers to care about the sun at all. That’s because it’s busy resting. Just like bears, the sun hibernates in the sky during the winter. Sure, it still provides sunshine – but just enough to get us through the day. When the sun wakes up, usually around mid-April, it begins a program of solar destruction that takes so many lives each year that it should be at the top of every Most Wanted list in the world.

I feel that it is my duty to combat the sun’s evil efforts by providing you with this list of helpful sun-fighting tips.

I don’t know what the sun has against us. What I do know is that the sun is a killer. People die from sun-related problems every single day during the summer and even though I am only one man, I feel the need to do my part. Don’t let the sun catch you off-guard. Be prepared. One day, we will tame the sun and make it do our bidding. Until then, we must always be vigilant.

In Anti-Solar Solidarity,
Dwight Schrute

There is a topic I’ve been meaning to bring up and this appears to be the appropriate time. I have noticed many more people taking photographs of things now that the true start of summer is nearly upon us. Photography is an “art” that I do not endorse. If you’d like to see how something looks, go see it with your own eyes. If you want to see a representation of something, then go look at a drawing or painting. Grandma Mannheim was especially adept at illustrating Strullpeter stories, so don’t try and tell me that photographs are better than drawings. Photographs merely replicate the human visual experience as a frozen moment in time and that insults the eyes and the memory.

When I was a tyke, my family did not have a camera. The general belief was that if a camera were introduced into our lives, our eyes would revolt, leaving us all blind and unable to operate our farm. Now that I’m an adult, I realize that this is unlikely. The eyes are very rational and I think they would adjust to sharing their optical duties with a camera, if a person chose to use such a device. I, however, still refuse to use a camera out of pure ocular respect.

Digital cameras allow the amateur photographer the freedom and ability to take six thousand pictures of a baby. Babies should not be photographed in the first place. They never grow up to look anything like they did as a baby, so what’s the point in having a picture of them? You might as well take photos of a small pony because that’s about as close a resemblance as babies have to their future selves and ponies are at least attractive creatures. But I digress. Digital cameras have all the negatives of traditional film cameras with none of the limitations. They’re like a mutated virus – attacking humanity without an antidote.

The biggest problem that I see with digital cameras is that they cause people to place so much less significance on a single image. If Leonardo Da Vinci finished the Mona Lisa and decided he didn’t like her barely detectable smile, would he have just thrown away the entire painting? Of course not. If the Mona Lisa was a digital picture, however, he easily could just pressed a button and the masterpiece would be lost forever. This is the plague of digital cameras. What once was permanent is now digitally expendable.

This is all to say that, even though I savor the taste of victory, I have interest in keeping the digital camera that I won by calling into Froggy 101. If you want to buy this worthless device, go ahead and make me an offer.

That. Is all.

Yours Truly,
Dwight Kurt Schrute

The comic books that the other gentleman was purchasing were of the “hentai” sub-genre. Hentai is disgusting. It is Japanese comic pornography and it is completely inappropriate. What disturbed me most about this man’s choices were that they were exclusively of the shokushu goukan variety. For those not familiar, shokushu goukan is the Japanese term for tentacle rape. These comics feature Japanese women getting taken advantage of by octopi. I truly do not understand their appeal. Octopi are, by their very nature, non-sexual creatures. After they reproduce, both the mother and father octopus die within a matter of months. What’s sexy about that? To chronicle the sexual nature of an octopus is as pointless as trying to find a beet weevil in December – it’s just a waste of time.

As I was perusing the contents of the various shokushu goukan comics, I kept happening on the same plot. Woman loves sailor. Sailor goes out to sea. Sailor is killed by giant octopus. Giant octopus rapes woman with its tentacles. This plot doesn’t make any sense. It paints giant octopi as if they’re these terribly vindictive creatures, not content to just kill sailors, but also to seek out and infiltrate their women. What do the Japanese have against octopi? What did octopi ever do to the Japanese besides providing a tremendous amount of nourishment in the form of tako sushi? It baffles me. It angers me. It saddens me.

The mighty octopus should be respected, not depicted as some horrible marine rapist. If you need to demonize a sea creature, make it the horrendous jellyfish, which provides not jelly but dangerous stings. I found out firsthand when I was taken to a beach on the shores of North Carolina in my youth. I have yet to return to an ocean beach.

Over the weekend, I will be returning to the shop where this terrible comic literature entered my possession. I will be exchanging it for my favorite manga: Ranma 1/2, the story of a teenaged boy trained from a young age to be a martial arts master, who is cursed to become a girl when splashed with cold water, but returns to male form when touched with cold water. Currently, the reason that it’s my favorite manga series is that there are no horny vindictive creatures with tentacles in Ranma 1/2 and that’s good enough for me.

This marks the end of today’s weblog. Fight Octopi Misrepresentation!

Arigato,
Dwight Kurt Schrute

1. The date is between March 21st and June 21st. If the date falls within this period of time, then it is a sign that spring has occurred or is occurring. It is indisputable. Seasons are demarcated by certain days in order to clearly define when a season is taking place.

2. The dirt is not frozen. In wintertime, the soil becomes frozen and unable to support crop growth. This changes when spring comes around because the temperature is warmer and the ground is thawed. If the ground is frozen, you can successfully determine that it is not yet spring.

3. There have been no major federal holidays for a month and there will be none for the next two months. At the beginning of spring, you do not have to worry about workers missing work thanks to federally mandated days off. If a worker attempts to miss a day of work based on a holiday of his own observance at the beginning of spring, that worker should be fired. The only holiday in the entirety of spring is Memorial Day and that doesn’t occur until the end of May.

4. My cousin Mose begins to talk about his birthday. Mose was born in late October and his birthday has always been a huge event in his life. He begins to start mentioning his birthday at the beginning of spring each year, giving him a full eight-month head start on the actual day of celebration. If Mose isn’t mentioning his birthday, it isn’t spring yet.

5. You can smell a faint stale manure smell when you walk outside. Manure does not give off an odor in the wintertime. The cold temperature neutralizes the smell and restricts the odor to the immediate vicinity of the excrement itself. In the spring, the rising temperature activates the smell of the manure and the longer it sits around, the more present the smell becomes. This scent becomes nearly unbearable to some people in summertime because it is too pungent. In the spring, however, the odor of manure hangs in the air like a gentle air freshener of defecation and that is how you know which season it is.

Please do not accept the unnatural indicators of spring as valid. They are merely children’s stories that have become accepted through years of negligence by an oral tradition that does not bother to check facts. The Schrute Farms Signs of Spring ring true each year and can be counted upon with the certainty of science. These are the only real ways to determine whether or not spring has truly sprung. Don’t believe the hype, people. Just stick to the facts.

This language will not take the place of conversation between people you know and trust. It will merely be used for the casual daily interactions with strangers that can become so difficult when words are introduced. If I sneeze, I don’t need to have a conversation about it. Thank you for your blessings, but please stop wasting my time. Also, it’s more polite to say gesundheit. My new language will take the place of these time-wasters and bring interpersonal communication back to its purest form.

Three claps: “Stop.”

Three short firm grunts: “Have an enjoyable day” and “This weather is lovely.”

One clap + quick low-pitch grunt: “I’m sorry.” [Only used rarely in Schrutenese]

Short nasal grunt: “Thank you for your help” and “go away.”

Long groaning robotic grunt: “Out of my way” and “take cover.”

Short slide-whistle grunt: “More,” “please,” and “really?”

Succession of rapid claps: “Good job,” “Bravo,” or “Congratulations.” [This is currently in use by most people.]

Two claps + howl-like grunt + four slow claps: “Ow.”

I do not expect to make any money off of this new language, so please do not think that I’m a huckster of some sort. I’m just a man. A man who wants to change the world through grunts, claps, traditional numerals, and two English words. If you are interested in receiving a copy of the Schrutanese dictionary when it becomes a completed resource material, please continue to search the internet as this will be the location of its publication. Thank you for your interest.

(Three short firm grunts),
Dwight K. Schrute

What good is a freshly grilled steak to me if I’m not sitting at a table? If I’m hiding in an elevated perch during a paintball battle, that steak becomes nothing less than a burden. When combatants from the other squad smell the steak, it could lead them right to me. If the steak sits out too long in the sun, there’s a strong likelihood that it will turn rancid. Shortly after that point it becomes a silent but deadly killer waiting for my hunger to unwittingly lead me into the meat’s treacherous clutches. “Traditional Meat Cookers” would probably want that to happen to me. They would like to see me die. Well guess what, enemies? Dehydrated meat leaves me vulnerable to NONE of the situations I described previously. It can be eaten discreetly and in any location. It is delicious without being messy. Best of all, it is highly nutritious.

To make jerky, you don’t need any fancy cooking equipment. I’ve seen television advertisements for professional “food dehydrators,” but these are made for morons (a category you may fit into if you still deny the awesome power of jerky). All you really need to make jerky is a knife and the sun. The knife is for cutting your meat into long, thin strips. The sun is for drying the meat. This all happens thanks to a little scientific process I like to call evaporation. If you so desire, you may also choose to season the meat. I don’t do this. It’s a frivolous task and a waste of spices. There is nothing wrong with unadorned meat and don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise. Salting the meat is a different story, however, and you should use salt liberally in order to remove as much moisture from the meat as possible. Once you’ve cut your meat into strips, find a clean area to hang the strips in the sun. Within a few days, your jerky will be ready for consumption, and when it is, the world is your oyster [NOTE: I have never seen or heard of oyster jerky].

Enjoy your newfound freedom as you travel the globe without worrying about where you’ll find a fresh source of protein. Your jerky will serve as a nutritional passport as you set your mind to other more important things, like how you will avoid the pickpockets that ruin most travel experiences both here in America and abroad.

Take heed, readers. Jerky will change your lives. All you have to do is open your mind.

This Entry Has Been Completed.

Dwight Kurt Schrute
Jerky Enthusiast

Additionally, the guests that we have hosted have not treated our belongings with the respect that we Schrutes give to our possessions. The night table constructed by my Great Uncle Gernot has been chipped and scratched as if it were a common scratching post. My familiar dining table has had beet jelly spilled upon it several times and, as everyone knows, beet jelly leaves stains that are entirely irremovable. After discussing the situation with various co-workers, it was suggested that I visit the massive furniture store run by Swedish people (In an effort to not slander nor promote any corporations in this weblog, I will refrain from naming with Swedish furniture store I patronized. Let’s just say that it was a bad “IDEA” that I shopped there).

While sampling their meatballs (surprisingly delicious, but not worthy of comparison to Grandma Mannheim’s fleischklops), I persuaded myself to buy one of the Swede’s night tables as a replacement for Great Uncle Gernot’s fine oak table. I just couldn’t imagine letting that table endure one more night of abuse by irresponsible travelers. The replacement table cost twenty-five dollars. It was made out of pine. Pine. For twenty-five dollars, I expect a lease for a small plot of land in a pine forest. Instead, I received eleven pieces of unfinished wood. Perhaps they would have liked to spit in my face as well.

When I got the table home, I set Mose to work assembling it. He completed the assembly in just under three minutes. I remember Mose making a similar table out of forest lumber when he was seven – as a joke. While we all laughed heartily then, except for Mose who was shunned for a week for participating in humor, nobody at Schrute Farms was laughing this time. Mose cried when he finished the construction. I don’t know if it was because of the poor materials and ridiculous tool he had to use or the memory of his long-forgotten forest lumber joke, but either way there were tears running down his bearded face and it breaks my heart to see that. It equally breaks my heart to have a piece of furniture in my home that is made of such a quality as that Swedish bedside table.

I smashed that table to pieces immediately. I couldn’t stand looking at it for one more second. From that day forward, I swore that I would never allow another piece of second-rate Swedish furniture into my home ever again.

Anything that makes Mose cry will henceforth be banished from Schrute Farms. Do not trifle with a Schrute. Ever.

That is all.

D. K. Schrute

For those of you who remain: welcome. You’re among decent spellers. It feels good to get rid of the poor-spelling moon-faces. Good riddance.

The point is, this girl didn’t know how to spell and her mother didn’t bother to correct her. That’s why I had to step in. I politely explained to the little girl that she was stupidly spelling the word incorrectly in her head. I went on to say that the rein in reindeer is spelled like that not because it refers to the reins that man uses to domesticate these animals, but because of the word’s etymological roots in the Norse languages. Additionally, I told her that reindeer are also known as caribou. The girl started crying and needless to say, I won’t be returning to fill up at Bewick’s anytime soon. I’m in the process of refining biobutanol from this year’s beet harvest anyway, so I won’t need gasoline at all from now on.

Spelling has always been important to me, as well as the Schrutes in general. Considering that the name Schrute is not the easiest name to spell, we decided that, as a clan, we needed to make spelling a priority. As a result, our home schooling emphasized spelling at the expense of other subjects that were deemed to be less important, like geometry and AP U.S. History. While I can easily spell “rhombus,” I sadly have no idea how to identify one.

Happy Holidays and a merry “That is all” to everyone.

With Utmost Sincerity,
Dwight Kurt Schrute

Resourcefulnacht is both a holiday and a small series of challenges for children. You can think of it as a dinner theatre with the theatre element being replaced by a string of events that include: knot-tying, beet loading and unloading, hand-to-hand combat using common household cleaning items, juggling, and a cooking challenge not unlike television’s “Top Chef” program*. In my teenage years, I was the knot-tying champion of Resourcefulnacht six years in a row. It remains one of my proudest achievements and also led to my inheritance of Schrute Farms.

The Schrute children look forward to Resourcefulnacht all year as a way to prove themselves to the elder Schrutes. It is on this night that a Schrute child can go from anonymous teat-sucker to worthy contributor in the family. My second cousin, Ehrlich, proved himself to be so useful during Resourcefulnacht festivities that he was placed in charge of the family’s international beet distribution operations. Sadly, Resourcefulnacht does not test for mathematical skills and it was soon discovered that Ehrlich had quickly run the entire international venture into the ground.

Whether you celebrate Thanksgiving or Resourcefulnacht, I commend you on controlling the turkey population in America. Should they be allowed to reproduce unchecked, this nation would be overrun by turkeys.

That is all.

Dwight K. Schrute

*NOTE: The Schrutes created this event long before “Top Chef” was ever invented. I’m not accusing them of stealing the idea, I just want all of my readers to know that the Schrutes are the progenitors of this style of culinary competition.

The full moon is also the time when the mythical lycanthrope, or “werewolf,” emerges. I do not believe in lycanthropes. I put no credence in the theory that a human can change into anything other than a decomposing human. Some of my relatives, however, fully trust that lycanthropes exist. Some have even claimed that they have seen them with their own eyes. They are obviously liars. They would have been devoured and unable to report the sighting. They also say that lycanthropes are especially attracted to Schrute Farm. False. The claw marks that we find the morning after full moons are from real wolves that enjoy the bounty of our farm. They are not from werewolves, no matter what you may have heard. Please do not let these rumors keep you away from the farm – it is beautiful this time of year. If you are seriously concerned, merely stay away from Schrute Farm during the full moon period and return as soon as the lunar cycle has advanced.

No matter how callous this may sound, Heindl deserved the bites and infections that he received. He also learned a very important lesson that day. Yes, he did have to spend a week in the hospital because of the blood loss and the ruined eye, but no, he was not attacked by a so-called “Man Wolf.” I hope this sets your mind at ease. All are welcome at our farm!

That is all.

Dwight K. Schrute

Post Script: Please do not come to Schrute Farm attempting to “trick or treat.” There will be no treats available for you. Also, if you plan to “trick,” be advised that Schrute Farm is private property and any actions with bad intentions will be dealt with as an immediate threat to farm security. You will be maced or bludgeoned and you will be delivered to the doorstep of the Lackawanna County Sheriff’s Office. See how much you like getting your treats in jail, kids.