It’s that most wonderful time of year, once again.

Christmas?

Well, yes, but also All-County football time.

The Vicksburg Post’s annual section displaying Warren County’s best gridiron talent will roll out this weekend. The Offensive Player of the Year award and the All-County offense will be unveiled in Sunday’s edition, followed by the defensive awards on Monday. The Coach of the Year award wraps it up on Tuesday.

For the longest time, the All-County team was penciled in for a Sunday in mid-December. All three awards were crammed into one very busy section. We had enough high schools in the surrounding area to do an All-Area team as well, which usually appeared either the Sunday before or the Sunday after.

We changed it about 10 years ago when the sports department had the revelation — aided by a busy schedule that shifted things back a week and a general sluggishness to get the thing done that particular year — that if we moved it to Christmas and spread it out over a couple of days then we could get everything done ahead of time and take the holiday off. It made sense from a planning standpoint, too, since there’s not a lot going on in the sports world on those days and those sections are some of the hardest to fill all year.

So, thanks to a little ingenuity, laziness, early deadlines and the desire to appease our families by actually showing up to Christmas dinner, a new holiday tradition was born.

Personally, I think it’s been one of the best adjustments we’ve ever made, and not just because it greatly enhanced my quality of life and made my wife happy. Christmas is obviously a special day and this only adds to it.

High school football is a minor blip on the radar screen of life, one that’s probably best not to dwell on as you age. And yet, for a couple dozen young people, this will be a moment they can point to for the rest of their lives as a time when they were the best around at something. That’s pretty rare in any endeavor, and definitely worth celebrating.

As the All-County teams roll out this Christmas weekend, let’s give a cheer for all of those who made the cut. It’s a pretty special thing to be good at something and recognized for it. As you go through life, try to enjoy this Christmas gift as one of the good ones.

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Ernest Bowker is a sports writer for The Vicksburg Post. He can be reached at ernest.bowker@vicksburgpost.com