Holiday miracle ensures effective sanitation practices.

Isn’t it a shame that, after a certain point in life, all the mystery goes out of the holidays? Remember coming down the stairs, seeing the tree ablaze with light, and wondering what delights awaited you?

Remember feeling so grateful when your brother got a brand new, very cool camera and you got… a homemade sock horse?

Exactly. Sometimes, the holidays stunk. Wouldn’t it have been better to be surprised by something like this?

First action seen by the fabulous new sewer stuff Santa Claus brought.

Absolutely.

Things are so much better now that there are Amazon Wish Lists. Everyone knows what I want! And, while it’s discouraging that, year after year, no one give me the Honda Metropolitan Scooter that’s there on my list, things have gotten decidedly better than those later days when my brother and I, as adults, received matching baby-blue walk shorts. Agh.

Nowadays I have a specially-named Amazon Wish List called High Hopes, chock-full of RV-related items I think I need or know I want. Over the last ten months or so the items have cycled on and off the list, as I have learned of more needs, acquired items, or decided something wasn’t needed after all.

And, for Christmas 2014, Santa Claus — actually, my brother — gave me the really cool sewer stuff pictured above.

Yes, a new Escape trailer comes with a sewer hose. But it turns out that, almost without exception, RV manufacturers include what is very much a Starter Model of hose, which isn’t going to last very long. And it’s too flexible. And it doesn’t fit neatly into a campground or dump station sewer connection. So when you hook it up to your trailer, it drops straight down to the ground and follows the ground’s contours all the way to the other end, and of course the other end has to come back UP to get into the sewer connection which is never at the lowest point of the campsite.

What you need, of course, is a steady, downward trajectory for your sewer hose. Because gravity is always in charge and you are not going to convince the stuff coming out of your trailer to suddenly go uphill here and there just because you need it to.

But now, thanks to Santa Claus (aka David & Holly), it’s all downhill for Toto and his… waste.