Half my life left to figure this out.
Every single year I have to confront the fact that I haven't yet gotten a grip on the holidays. I think some part of me still feels that the adults are taking care of all the details, so I don't have to bother.
I usually manage some stuff. I organized a very small donation drive for a domestic violence shelter in our community. We decorated. We made the traditional sugar cookies to eat while decorating.* This year, for the first time, we even got a tree! A live tree! It's two feet tall, and it lives in a 3-gallon pail filled with rocks and water, but it's a real tree! And we have a wreath that Duchess made and brought home from a craft party at the home of a friend whose florist grandmother was visiting. So our home looks WAY more Christmassy than every before. I'm also fairly prepared to cook some nice food over the holiday. And I have presents ready for everybody who will be at my house on Christmas! All three of them!
The activity for which I am most prepared this holiday is the cookie exchange party we're attending tomorrow. This is a social event that might have been designed exactly for me - it's in the afternoon, it's brief, and it involves baking. I plan to bring three different kinds of cookies, all of which will be good.** If this was what the whole holiday entailed, I would be not exactly the Martha-Stewart-style queen of the season, but I would definitely be a reliable minister of some kind.
However, there's a whole lot of other stuff that I didn't get around to. This week, I discovered that it's prohibitively expensive to mail a present five business days before Christmas Day, so the package I sent will not be arriving until after Christmas, a week after almost half of the intended recipients of the gifts inside will have left the package's destination. That was a sad moment. But today was the day I really realized that yet again, I missed the holiday boat. Our mail today included three holiday cards from friends, and I realized that I had never even thought about holiday cards this year. At all. And I LOVE getting them, I really do. The classy ones with a brief message, the ones with all the adorable photos of your adorable kids, and the ones with long hand-written notes - I love them ALL. So maybe I'll send out Presidents' Day cards this year. Regardless, thank you all for your cards! I love them!
*Skipper, who is very interested in cooking and baking, was in charge of rolling the cookies in cinnamon sugar, so the cookies were completely brown. They tasted fine, though. Skipper is experienced enough with baking that when I assign her a bowl of ingredients to stir, she asks gravely "Can this be over-mixed?"
** I've done a lot of baking, I've got some excellent equipment, and I have learned to use good ingredients. Cookie-making is one area of my life about which I remain fairly confident, even when Skipper is helping me out.
I usually manage some stuff. I organized a very small donation drive for a domestic violence shelter in our community. We decorated. We made the traditional sugar cookies to eat while decorating.* This year, for the first time, we even got a tree! A live tree! It's two feet tall, and it lives in a 3-gallon pail filled with rocks and water, but it's a real tree! And we have a wreath that Duchess made and brought home from a craft party at the home of a friend whose florist grandmother was visiting. So our home looks WAY more Christmassy than every before. I'm also fairly prepared to cook some nice food over the holiday. And I have presents ready for everybody who will be at my house on Christmas! All three of them!
The activity for which I am most prepared this holiday is the cookie exchange party we're attending tomorrow. This is a social event that might have been designed exactly for me - it's in the afternoon, it's brief, and it involves baking. I plan to bring three different kinds of cookies, all of which will be good.** If this was what the whole holiday entailed, I would be not exactly the Martha-Stewart-style queen of the season, but I would definitely be a reliable minister of some kind.
However, there's a whole lot of other stuff that I didn't get around to. This week, I discovered that it's prohibitively expensive to mail a present five business days before Christmas Day, so the package I sent will not be arriving until after Christmas, a week after almost half of the intended recipients of the gifts inside will have left the package's destination. That was a sad moment. But today was the day I really realized that yet again, I missed the holiday boat. Our mail today included three holiday cards from friends, and I realized that I had never even thought about holiday cards this year. At all. And I LOVE getting them, I really do. The classy ones with a brief message, the ones with all the adorable photos of your adorable kids, and the ones with long hand-written notes - I love them ALL. So maybe I'll send out Presidents' Day cards this year. Regardless, thank you all for your cards! I love them!
*Skipper, who is very interested in cooking and baking, was in charge of rolling the cookies in cinnamon sugar, so the cookies were completely brown. They tasted fine, though. Skipper is experienced enough with baking that when I assign her a bowl of ingredients to stir, she asks gravely "Can this be over-mixed?"
** I've done a lot of baking, I've got some excellent equipment, and I have learned to use good ingredients. Cookie-making is one area of my life about which I remain fairly confident, even when Skipper is helping me out.
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