My husband, the lovely Greg, is a practicing Buddhist with splashes of Hinduism for added holy flavor. We have a meditation room in which he retreats twice a day to clear his mind or maybe he’s pulling his pud, I don’t know what he’s doing in there.

Greg also pushes himself daily at the gym, going to kick boxing, MMA and other various forms of life-threatening hand-to-hand combat classes. And every morning he joins the neighboring Anglophiles for their run.

Enter the Garden Gnomes.

Without fail he complains about our neighbors’ garden gnomes. He hates them. They’ve been moved due to winter weather so, in essence, Greg can’t see them but he knows they’re mocking him from behind the snow banks.

I’m told he isn’t the only person who hates these sneering gnomes. Apparently, they’re THE topic of discussion between the passing morning runners, with comments such as “Classless idiots” or the more popular “Damn gnomes!”

It didn’t surprise me to hear Greg had become the ring leader of the gnome-haters. His alpha male personality compels him to greatness. I can’t say where his hatred of gnomes steams. I imagine it to be a repressed gnome related childhood experience which its side effects I now live.

This morning after his morning rant, I cautiously from the opposite side of the kitchen island pointed out that he’s a Buddhist and therefore should love all God's creatures, even the classless gnome lovers. I then snapped off the leg of my day old gingerbread man and bounced from the kitchen before he could reply.

Minutes later I found him deep in meditation. Not really sure what sent him in search of his higher self: my comment or the sneering gnomes.

I’ll watch him in the coming days. I have a feeling those gnomes are gonna go missing and given his fondness for MMA things could get brutal.