‘Tisn’t the season

The run-up to Christmas always involves more than I expect. No matter how early the “shopping” is done, there is always a little more to do – the Christmas Eve gifts, things for people we didn’t know we’d be seeing, the mailing and arranging and serving as a package depot for others sending their gifts here. About 90% of the actual gift-buying is done online, and has been for years, but a couple of purchases required three trips to the mall, which is three trips more than I like to make in a year. The mall is not my thing, and in times of straitened circumstances, it seems not only noisy, busy and filled with horrible people, its offerings of pointless purchases, items of absolutely no value that are only sold because some sort of gift is needed, feels tasteless and desperate. That’s not to say I haven’t given tasteless, unthoughtful and desperate gifts, just that I don’t like to be reminded of it.

It also involves housecleaning on a level that I’m short on time for this year. The simple installation of the Christmas tree led to moving the couch which led to rearranging, realphabetizing, and consolidating every CD and DVD we own into albums, a ridiculous effort that ate up 7 or 8 hours over the weekend and resulted in a room that looks 7 or 8 percent neater. The inside of the refrigerator must be scrubbed, so naturally I’m thinking of putting down new flooring in the hallway, which has gone happily unfinished for years. The outside lights did not get put up and likely won’t – lights were never my big thing anyway – but I am making progress on digitizing my old cassettes, because the living room re-org led to the realization that there is no reason to have the cassette deck in there (and no reason to have the mini-disc player at all). Gone is the complicated system of tubes and wires that connected the tape deck to the laptop, the needless copying of files from laptop to the real computer, etc., etc. I just plugged the cassette deck into the computer, and now I’m happily copying away those gems from yesteryear. Why was that so hard to figure out?

We got through one holiday concert this week, then we have The Nutcracker on Sunday (every last minute of Sunday), a couple of school days next week and then a long, drawn-out Christmas. Divorce screws up Christmas plans for everyone, even those of us who aren’t divorced, so don’t do it. What used to be a fairly compact little celebration that started on Christmas Eve and was completely over with by the next night this year requires an extra day, an extra meal plan, extra logistics on who is opening what when, and a plan for how to fill the time that would have been spent with the family members who won’t be here. (Our current plan for that, by the way, is to be one of those families who go to the movies on Christmas day, and go enjoy a bit of rampant silliness in the new Sherlock Holmes movie.)

I also haven’t played any Christmas music yet, which is probably responsible for a good chunk of my lack of feeling, so I guess it’s time to put “Daddy Drank Our Christmas Money” into the rotation. Merry Christmas!