Maybe some folks thought they were giving me a late Christmas present or an early birthday present, but my first reaction was maybe this was a really early April Fool's Day joke - there they were, one forwarded copy after another in my email inbox when I returned from the holidays, and for a week I haven't known what to do with this thing.

The short version is this: The chairwoman of the Alabama Democratic Party, Nancy Worley, sent a holiday letter to friends and Democrats all over the state describing, among other things, how she got stuck on the toilet and couldn't get up.

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What do you do with something like that? Reading it is kind of like watching a dog humping a cat. You kind of want to stop it but you aren't sure how. Maybe you're supposed to be OK with it if they are OK with it. You feel shame for the part of you that is amused by it, and nothing will ever erase the image from your brain, but you'll still try to pretend it never happened.

But then there's another part of me that screams, But she put it in her damn Christmas letter to Democrats all around Alabama!

Only through some sort of late-inning Christmas miracle is blood not pouring from both my ears.

This isn't the first time Worley's Christmas letter has drawn a columnist's attention. Several years ago, a previous letter caught the eye of my former colleague George Talbot. Then Worley claimed in her holiday message that her office had been bugged and that she had told things she knew to other people she trusted so that when she finally got around to writing her book no one would be able to stop her from getting the truth out.

Years later, apparently that truth had something to do with upgrading from a 14-inch-high toilet to a 17-inch-high toilet.

On Tuesday, Worley seemed confused why anyone would care about the story in her letter, which she said described a fall and her trouble with her knees.

"Quite frankly, if someone cares about one minute detail in a letter, then they must not have anything interesting going on," she said.

I had convinced myself that I would leave it be and hope the nightmares would fade, but I worried that if any folk on the right learned I'd turned a blind eye (or blinded eye?) they'd raise all unholy hell about showing favoritism to the left.

Ultimately, one of my Democrat friends convinced me Monday that there's some value to sharing it.

"It's the perfect analogy for where the state party is today," he said. "Stuck on the toilet and it can't get up."

So here you go. Now I can forget about it, and you never will.

Happy New Year!

Updated at 3:00 to include Worley's comment regarding the letter.