I woke up the morning after Halloween with a tiny bit of a sugar hangover.
It’s the same thing year after year. After collecting enough candy to fill a football stadium and eating enough candy to keep every dentist in this city in business for years to come, the children fall into deep sleep filled with dreams of Skittles, Twizzlers and chocolate bars.
That’s when I get down to business. The business of picking out all the Almond Joys that I can find, and eating so many that you would think I was a bear going into hibernation for the winter. November 1st is a recovery day from the Almond Joy binge and over the next few days I put the Halloween decorations away and start focusing on Thanksgiving.
So imagine my surprise when I woke up on November 1st, loaded up my children for school and turned on the radio only to hear…..Christmas music. I panicked thinking maybe I had slept so deeply that I had been asleep for three weeks. How can it be Christmas already????
Don’t get me wrong, I love the holidays. I love every minute of decorating the house, hanging the lights, picking out the tree and watching the children get so excited.
I anticipate Christmas Eve even more than the kids and can honestly say it is my favorite day of the year. The kids are so excited and are sickeningly sweet to each other in hopes that Santa will see that they are being extra good. I can just about get them to pitch in and help out with any chore on that one day. Even the stress of trying to get all the kids bathed and cleaned to wear semi-matching outfits to church on this one night doesn’t damper my happiness. So please don’t think I am saying bah-hum bug about hearing the sounds of Christmas.
It just threw me to turn the radio on and hear “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” when most houses still have the pumpkins from the night before sitting on their front porches. Please let me throw my pumpkin out, pack away the witches broom and come off my Almond Joy rush before I have to start thinking about Christmas! What happened to Thanksgiving? Why are we in such a rush to get to Christmas? Oh my gosh, if we are already planning for Christmas, that means I need to start making my New Year’s resolutions. That means I have to face the fact that I didn’t follow through on any of the ones from last year! And if I’m going to think about New Years, than I have to think about my birthday, which is after New Year’s… which means I have to face getting another year older and not any wiser!
I fell asleep with dreams of Christmas trees, pumpkins, the New Year’s baby and a turkey chasing me. This morning Finn woke me up at 4 a.m. telling me he forgot to tell me his Thanksgiving feast was today and that he had to bring in some kind of food for his class. Half asleep, I told him that I didn’t get a note about it and I was sure it was next week. I laid there for a minute and then hopped out of bed. If the Christmas songs are already playing on the radio and the Christmas trees are out at every store, maybe the schools really are going to have their Thanksgiving feast two weeks before the actual Thanksgiving day.
Maybe they are in this rush to get to the next holiday and he really does have to take in some food for his feast? I whipped up the only thing that I could think of at 4 a.m. – deviled eggs- and sent them to school with him. A little while after he went to school, I got an email from the teacher with a list of what every child is supposed to bring NEXT WEEK for the Thanksgiving feast. It is nice to know that not everyone is rushing ahead, but I am sure she is trying to figure out why I sent a plate of deviled eggs to school with a six year old.
The holidays are coming and perhaps much more quickly than I anticipated. The best way to accept that fact is for me to turn on some holiday music, sit down on my front porch next to the Halloween pumpkin, munch on a few Almond Joys, write down my menu for what I will serve 22 people for Thanksgiving dinner, make some New Year’s resolutions and make a list of a few birthday wishes. Holiday multi-tasking at its finest!
