Christmas creep, that delightful phenomenon that has the holiday starting earlier and earlier each year, is turning me into a bit of a Grinch, what with the Xmas-themed turn my Pinterest dashboard took, oh, about last JULY, and the obsessive need for people who weren’t hugged enough as children to start Elf-on-a-Shelf-ing in Mid-November. I love Christmas, but it doesn’t have to start this early. December 7th is a good day for it to start this year, in case you were wondering.
I don’t like Christmas creep because, like most normal people, I want to enjoy the holiday that comes before it, Thanksgiving. Like many moms, I made a pretty good 3-day action plan for my time this week, so that I could have a great long weekend with my kids, 16 lbs of turkey, and enough carbohydrate-based food products to induce a coma. I had a cleaning the house plan, and a prepping the meal in advance plan, all designed so that Wednesday night I could enjoy a cocktail and a movie in an immaculate house, knowing the next day would be an easy bit of cooking and a huge amount of eating. The 3 day action plan was based, of course, on my kids being in school this week.
But this plan was thwarted when I realized that the school calendar that I have, the one the Board of Education gave me, had been sneakily updated after (a dirty trick, indeed, and not the first time this year it has happened) it was distributed, to reflect that tomorrow is, in fact, a day off for the kids, and my 3-day action plan had to be crammed into 2 days, a fact made even more difficult by the fact that I wasted most of Monday having to tell my husband how wrong he was about something, a snippy little marital moment that took all day and left me searching the kitchen for hidden chocolate. And for the record? He was so, so wrong, but every holiday season starts, for us, with the traditional Yelling At My Husband About Our Goddamned Christmas Cards For Chrissakes Already I asked You To Handle This Last July. That is a fight that falls in familiar territory, one so well-fought for so many years that we could probably switch places mid-fight and keep going without missing a beat.
So that was Monday, and then I had one day – today – to get everything ready for Thanksgiving, but also to get the house ready for the Xmas season, which apparently starts on December 1st (or mid-November, if you follow the Pinterest-ers that I do), and I cannot get my act together today. Mostly because I would rather play a little CIV V and eat cookies instead of cleaning out my fridge and vacuuming the dust bunnies underneath the furniture. I love my kids, but I NEED that Wednesday back, an extra day of an empty house, to get it all ready so that I can have a few moments of tranquility on the holidays, too.