40 days and 14 hours. That’s how long we have until Christmas. Yes, I’m a little surprised that I was able to Google days til Christmas and come up with a Christmas Countdown clock. I shouldn’t be, but it seems like there are better programming choices than that.
Anyway, Christmas. 40.5 days of shopping left. I know. There are a ton of you who haven’t given this any thought yet. Clearly none of you are flying home for the holidays. But we are, and that means I have to do a ton more planning for the holiday than I’d like.
There are the folks I don’t normally see but this year I’ll have to find a nice gift for. Hard to do when you see each other every other year. These are the people in my life who would, on this coast, get homemade Irish Cream truffles, sea salt scrubs, knit scarves or some other Pinterest-inspired gift. But since I have to get it across the country without breakage, I have to either buy supplies/bottles and ship them to California and spend a day in the kitchen there, or I have to make it here and pack it very carefully. And hope TSA doesn’t decide they want softer hands and spiced pecans.
Of course, next week I’ll be writing that great holiday favorite: the family Christmas letter.
Being a freelance writer gives me a leg up on most in that department because I have InDesign so I can put together something nice and spend an extra 100 hours making sure everything lines up perfectly. Because I know you’re all going to pull out rulers and check to see if the spacing is equal on all columns.
My letter comes and goes depending on the news. The year my mom died and I was getting divorced I didn’t do the letter. Merry Christmas! May Death and Destruction Stay with Me, Not with You! Somehow, I couldn’t find a lot of happy to share that year.
This year, even with the loss of a job, I feel like there’s good news. Snarky Daughter and Scout Son each get a column in the newsletter, so I only have to find about 300 words of happy, and with two books coming out this month, I think I can wing it.
But that’s next week. This week, I’m cruising Pinterest for cool homemade gift ideas, making a shopping list for pies for Thanksgiving. And putting up the Christmas tree. Tonight. No ornaments or lights, just the tree. I want to see what the kittens will do to it. I fully expect to find Rex sleeping at the top tomorrow morning. I’ll keep you posted.
Feel free to start the pool on how many times the cats knock it over.
What’s that? Why am I putting up a tree when I won’t be here?
That’s a really good question. The answer involves pitiful faces on sweet children who want to decorate for the season.
Whatever. I have gifts to work on.
