Ho, ho, ho!

The holidays are a time of good cheer and good will toward fellow human beings, or so we are encouraged to believe and practice. But for every Christmas elf, there's a grinch who is not content to grouse in the privacy of his or her own home. These unlovable souls make sport of going out in public to take the merriness out of others' enjoyment of the season.

No doubt everyone has a story to tell about rude holiday behavior. There's a lot of public rudeness anyway, but it all gets exacerbated when there are more people on the road and in the stores, stressed by any manner of holiday deadlines.

But, we don't want to suffer in silence anymore.

This year, we're going to call out people for their Grinch-like behavior and want to hear your true holiday stories of spoiled moments due to others' rudeness, from Christmas past or present. We'll run some of the best stories before Christmas, and the person with the best story will receive a $100 prize to alleviate some of their pain and suffering.

Send your tales by Dec. 16 to Holiday Horrors, Features Section, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 7-210 Waterfront Plaza, Honolulu 96813. Be sure to include your name, address and phone number.

To give you an idea of what we're looking for, on our own staff, writer Burl Burlingame reports seeing a woman in a parking lot reach her car and burst into tears at the door, only to have a driver waiting for her spot, yell, “;Hey lady, you going to move that car or what?”;

While Christmas shopping at Wal-Mart two years ago, assistant features editor Donica Kaneshiro let go of her shopping cart full of toys and gifts for just a minute to grab something from a sale display at the end of an aisle strewn with toys and other harried customers. When she returned seconds later, she found her amassed items dumped unceremoniously on the ground and her cart stolen.

“;I was all the way at the back of the store, and I had to haul my stack of gifts all the way to the front registers and I kept dropping things,”; Kaneshiro said. “;There were lots of carts at the front of the store. How lazy can you get?”;

Meanwhile, a reader named Kat wrote about having gone to a Manoa restaurant feeling lucky that someone was pulling out of a parking space as soon as she got there. But, while waiting for the space, a man walked into the middle of the stall and refused to move because he wanted to save the space for a friend in a white truck behind her car.

“;This guy was very lucky that only females were in the car; he may have been hurt if there were males in our car. Could it be because I was Asian, female or local that this guy thought he could abuse us? Please make our story known so that rude people—no matter what their color or sex may be—realize that rude behavior such as coming out from nowhere to save a parking space for a car who is not next in line is unacceptable.”;

Well said. The next time that happens, call the police or mall security to remove the traffice obstruction.

Grinches, we'll be looking for you.