Some columnists use the end of a year to confess errors in their offerings over the past 12 months, others to brag of their successes, i.e., “you read it here first.”

I usually give you my annual compilation of ripoffs and rotters, sometimes my favorite stories, and this time, a new category, gripes and gratifications. Well, mostly gripes.

I thought of it the other night when I awoke and couldn’t get back to sleep so I turned the radio on, hoping the repeat radio talk show stuff would lull me back to dreamland.

It was just beginning to work when one of the most annoying commercials I have ever heard, and I’ve heard this one before many times, came on. It’s for an outfit called Consolidated Credit Union and some women shriek “FREEDOM! FREEDOM! FREEDOM! — all the way through it. It sets your teeth on edge and I always turn the radio down at the first sound of it. I have always wondered why the sponsors don’t realize how really irritating this cacophonous uproar is.

I ‘d no sooner turned the sound back up when the first of what I knew would be a dozen repeats of the latest Crime Stoppers of Puget Sound bulletins came on, promising up to $1,000 for clues to the capture of the killer of the month. Why do they run these things over and over at night, and rarely during the daytime. Do informers only listen at night?

Wide awake, I mused over other gripes I had with radio, and remembered when I suddenly had enough of the inability of the KVI talk show hosts to pronounce the word poem correctly and wrote them about it. This was after Rush had left for KTTH, but I heard Michael Medved, John Carlson and the others mispronounce poem as pome.

I wrote them that a po-em is a two-syllable word for a composition in verse and a pome is a one syllable word for a fleshy fruit with a central core and five seeds, such as an apple. Either they did not get my note or disregarded it, because the misuse continued, especially by Medved, supposedly the most literate of the bunch. I heard him doing it again in his new digs at KTTH. I hope he doesn’t taint his fellow workers with his refusal to accept that he is wrong.

My biggest gripe about television is when a movie is over and the credits come on telling you who played whom and the station immediately scrunches it to one side so the print is so small it is unreadable, while ads are run for coming attractions. Sometimes the movie maker doesn’t end with such a list so to this day I don’t know who played which woman in “The Birdcage.”

Another gripe is when the president or some other big shot is coming on with a speech, copies of which are given out to the reporters just before air time, and they tell you what he’s going to say before he says it. I want my news from the horse’s mouth, not the other end.

As a more timely gripe, as annoying as it is to hear the different versions of the avoidance of saying Merry Christmas and offending non-Christians, none is more so than Jack in the Box with all those people in their phony reindeer horns calling out “Good holiday spirit” to each other. I’ve never heard anyone wish anyone else “Good holiday spirit” until Jack in the Box came up with it this year as its substitute for Merry Christmas. Shame on Jack in the Box.

Medved reported that in the U.S., one percent of the people are atheists, one percent are Jews, less than one percent are Muslims and other religions and the rest are Christians. So why can’t we behave like a Christian nation and allow Nativity scenes and other trappings related to the birth of Christ in schools and other public places, since we are so tolerant of other religions?

One thing I can say about Medved and other Jewish talk show folk in this region, of whom there seem to be many, they are so supportive of Christians that unless they talk about their Jewishness, you’d never know it. They even say Merry Christmas. I hope that by this time next year, we can stem the erosion of the celebration of the religion on which this nation was founded. I hope your Christmas was merry, you have a Happy New Year, and God bless us, every one.

(Adele Ferguson an be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, WA 98340.).