 |
| This is actually a town in the U.P. Their post office gets hammered every December. |
Wow, Christmas is a week from tomorrow. I've barely done any shopping yet, and most of my gifts still have to journey UPS-style across the tundra to Minnesota. Tomorrow I am going to rise with the sun and drag my poor husband out to the stores to suffer through the results of my procrastination along with me. Sorry, sweetie.
I grew up in Michigan, where Christmas was always preceded by snow and bitter cold, a fresh-cut pine tree, and my mom's seasonal goodies like brown sugar tartlets and caramel corn. After Michigan, I spent a few years in Munich, with its fantastic annual Christkindlmarkt in Marienplatz and Glühwein sellers in the English Garden. There was one mildly stressful Christmas in Istanbul after that, which is a story in itself, and then my future husband and I moved to California in 2001.
I suppose that people who've lived their entire lives in southern California have no trouble getting into the holiday spirit in 60-degree weather, but without the props from my youth, I generally have a hard time. We're spending the holidays at our home this year, so without a family gathering in the Northland to look forward to, Christmas feels like nothing but a high-pressure commercial binge.
Once the shopping pain is past, there are some things I'm looking forward to: spending some stress-free time with my husband, gobbling up matinees of all the Oscar bait films, and hopefully getting a little free time to work more on those revisions. There's an SNI* winking at me from a corner of my brain, maybe I'll give her a minute or two as well. These are the happy thoughts I'll be clinging to tomorrow while fighting the teeming hordes.
I wish everyone the best in this final pre-holiday crunch time. Batten the hatches and gird your loins, or whatever it is they say. Let's all make it to the new year with our sanity intact.
*Shiny New Idea, dangerous predator of the revision-addled mind
No comments:
Post a Comment