You better not pout. You better not cry. You better not shout.

Yeah, yeah I’m getting to tellin’ you why. Well, gimme a second here. Sheeeeesh!

Ahem. Now, as I was saying, all that huffing and puffing may not just blow down the straw house of some pretentious little piggies, but it might also cause any partaking humans some premature wrinkles and crinkles.

Not to be confused with Kris Kringle, who also wants you to avoid those things lest you find a premature diamond in your stocking. (That’s a lump of coal for all you young’ns out there who may be teetering on just this side of naughty, a’ight?)

What? You thought I was going somewhere else with that advice?

Give me at least a smidgen of creative credit, ‘kay? Old PK’s still got a few original thoughts knocking around in that nutty ol’ noggin of hers.

Hee!

But seriously, I got to pondering about that old adage that it takes, like, 99 muscles to frown and only one to smile, and guess what I discovered? It’s sorta like fruitcake — it’s just all kinds of wrong

GRRR on both counts.

Hey, I can’t say anything more stern than grrr. After all, getting some sad sack of coal in my fuzzy, oversized red sock doesn’t necessarily soot, er, suit me, capisce?

Look, word on the street is he sees you even when you’re SLEEPING for heaven’s sake. Why chance things at this stage of the game? I digress.

Seriously though, happy campers are much more likely to get new gear under their trees, you dig? ‘Tis the season to be flashing those pearly whites, y’all. This is when we should be all joyin’ and cheerin’ and what not, ding dang it!

You know by now that I needed to do a little recon on the topic.

I went right to the source (not the North Pole, cyber studying, natch!) on this one and doggone it, the funky facts I found say it takes about only 11 muscles to grimace and 12 to show off the latest whitening toothpaste on tap.

Hmpf.

Suffice it to say, online research — by split, razor-thin and un-PK-like decision — proves PK to be a pinhead. Nevertheless, she’s still a peppy Pollyanna.

What? So, I like to wear rose-colored glasses 11 out of 12 months of the year; it’s not a crime — yet. Someone somewhere is laying out a lame lawsuit, likely a lunkhead-like litigation-laden loser.

Sorry. Back to it.

Apparently, the entire debate rounds into a near tie (or perhaps a dead heat if you’re a smirker?) because according to https://science.howstuffworks.com:

“While there is no scientific basis for such claims as the one suggesting that technically you need 12 muscles to exude a true smile and 11 to frown — but even those numbers are arguable. Such sayings serve to convey a very important message: smiling makes us feel happier. It is not a cure-all for every situation … but in terms of getting us past a small dose of the blues, it can help to lift the sense of sadness being experienced.”

See? The super smarties summon smiles over sourpusses.

The gist is this: Even though we have to accept the facts of life, (to borrow the name of an old 1980s sitcom), there’s always a simply sly solution for dumping dejection, darlins’.

Oh, for Pete’s sake, just lighten up, Francis, and get grinny with it.

This holiday season, smile though your heart is aching, smile even though it’s breaking (instead of secretly but succinctly stealing someone else’s stuff).

I’ll sum it up in a bit of PK-speak: Don’t compile any bile about a smile or you’ll be eating crow for quite a while.

Kimerer is a columnist with a rhyming rash. Send her packets of Cortizone and your quirky questions to pkimerer@zoominternet.net.