The 2013 Curmudgeon Season has officially begun!

This has been floating around the Internet lately – and I think it sums up the season rather brilliantly:

I would definitely be that second one. To be honest, I’m beginning to wonder if my body somehow stores up all the Curmudgeon I possess throughout the year, and then releases it in one desperate purge triggered by the overly-early and enthusiastic start to Retailamas.

I mean, there it is…early-October…it is still 80-90 degrees outside…I’m sweating and just want to pick up some lousy thing or other I was just informed will cause World War III if it is not brought to some event or other tonight…and OHMYGAH, CHRISTMAS! JINGLE-FRICKIN-BELLS! GIVE! GIVE! GIVE TO EVERYONE! GIVE ALL THE THINGS TO ALL THE EVERYONES! If you don’t buy everyone the Things, you are a bad person! You can ONLY show gratitude and affection and prove you are NOT a soulless demon – possibly even a REPUBLICAN! - by BUYING CRAP. So, BUY THE CRAP! BUY ALL THE CRAP! 25% OFF! 50% OFF! DID I MENTION THAT YOU ARE AN IDIOT IF YOU DO NOT SNAG THIS BARGAIN?! YOU MUST BUY THE CRAP, BUY IT, I SAY!!!

Suddenly, I’m the kind of person who goes around snarling “WHAT’S SO DAMNED MERRY ABOUT IT?!” and “When the HELL did ANY of the assorted $DEITIES with fingers in the winter-solstice-ish time of year EVER say ‘go forth and buy cheap plastic crap, lest I smite thee for not being a Goode Persone©’?!”

And then there’s the way my fellow humans turn into crazed herd animals, flocking from one store to the next like starved wildebeest, stampeding and trampling everything in their path.

And taking all the parking spots.

Like, all of them.

And perversely, watching others do this, watching the commercials in which perfect domestic bliss is achieved by doting individuals presenting each other with perfect gifts (conveniently available at extreme discounts at your local StuffMart™ {annoying jingle here}), watching people at the mall in all the various stages of shopping – from giggling excitement to red-faced screaming at exhausted, sweaty clerks because they don’t have whatever-it-is in chartreuse, you don’t understand, my mother-in-law MUST have a CHARTREUSE thingee-mah-witchit, otherwise I am a BAD SON-OR-DAUGHTER-IN-LAW!…witnessing the increasing emotion and pace of the season in action…being jostled while I’m just trying to pick up a couple @^*&@ing gallons of milk, or having my ankles mauled by shopping carts piloted by semi-frantic yet astonishingly inattentive people desperately looking for this only blue and in a size that, or fending off 24/7 attacks on my psyche that are so unsubtly trying to instill that message that I must spend-spend-spend to celebrate…

Well.

It’s enough to cause me to seriously consider throwing three or four pieces of leftover Halloween candy nobody wanted into random boxes I dug out of the recycling pile, wrapping them in Sunday comics plucked out of the to-be-made-into-compost-or-worm-bedding-or-something bin, pitching them under the tree and calling it a season.

Dear Family:

I love you. Truly. I do. But. Screw this whole scene. If you need me, I will be locked in my bedroom wearing headphones and watching old cartoons and stuff, and also knitting things. WITH LOVE IN EVERY STITCH, DAMMIT.

See you in the spring.

XOXO  ~ Mom

What I find peculiarly ironic about this is…I actually do really enjoy the gift-giving. I like to make the people I care about happy, and I am thrilled when that perfect thing comes to me.

Especially because usually, frankly, it doesn’t. Or, it does, but is ludicrous in some way. Like, sure, I’d love to get the husband a vintage Camaro. It would be an awesome present! And also ridiculous! And a great way to show that I am a terrible steward of our income, and probably should never be trusted with it again!

Which then puts me into this spiral where I can’t seem to find a happy medium. And I bounce back and forth between various lame, not-as-good and equally-ridiculous things until I eventually end up buying him a box of raw almonds and a copy of the 1987 tax code at the very last possible second.

Because almonds are great. Especially the raw ones. Because they’re, you know, delicious…yet healthy! And buying him healthy food is like the ultimate in ‘I love you, see how much I love you? I don’t want you to die and junk like that!’ gifts!

And ‘tax code’ is all, like, um, INTELLIGENT-Y and some junk. And I think of him as an INTELLIGENT-Y person! See? See how that…works…? it wasn’t the very last thing on the shelves or anything, gosh no, I HAD A PLAN THERE…!

{face-palm}

Last of the great romantics, especially when under pressure. <= me

The only thing I do really enjoy about the holiday season is stuff like this:

(I know! The cuteness! And this isn’t showing the whole story at all, which is that these two boys were collaborating with their games, and it was so adorable that pretty much the whole world just dropped over dead from it. That’s right. You are all ghosts now, because of the power of the Cuteness these two were putting out. Sorry.)

(This is actually more remarkable than it looks – Captain Adventure never allows another kid to sit that close to him, other than possibly a sister. But they don’t count, because they’re ‘safe’ people whereas pretty much every other kid in the whole world is terrifying and/or annoying and/or unpredictable and really on the whole let’s just not be around them, ‘mkay? But apparently, his cousin was an OK kinda guy.) 

BUT NEVER MIND ALL THAT. Because, knitting. 

This is Fia, which has been growing with painful slowness. In related news, I think I’ve decided that the next time I decide on a must-knit pattern, I should choose something in worsted weight, instead of fingering-for-pete’s-sake. Honestly. Sometimes I really do wonder what is wrong with me…but, I digress.

On BART, watching shows, a couple rows here, a couple rows there…it’s ever-so-slowly starting to look like a sweater-thing. And it is a fun knit, too – difficult enough to be interesting, not so difficult that I want to claw my own eyeballs out, or can’t work on it on the train.

The sleeves are actually already done…that was some interesting construction, actually, because they are knitted together, in the round, with steeks…I’m still not sure whether I like that method or not. I suppose I’ll know my own mind on that after I’ve finished the thing and seen how much effort was(n’t) saved by doing them that way.

I have a business trip coming up next week, all week, including a couple 5 hour flights there and back again, so I have high hopes for getting to the point where I will abandon it for months on end because ugh, finishing be able to proudly wear it give it to one of my daughters, because clearly I have still not gotten my arms around the concept that I am no longer quite as small as once I was.

Also, there will be no time for shopping. Or finding myself having to face the mall for any reason. And then it will be two weeks down, less than two weeks to go, y’all.

I may just survive the 2013 Curmudgeon season yet…

Today and every day

This Christmas came upon me in that way things often do when you’ve overloaded yourself with Things To Do: It seemed like the dishes from Thanksgiving weren’t even dry yet, and suddenly I was up in the middle of the night wrapping presents because hel-LO, Christmas Eve, and where did YOU come from?!

It did not help that the last two weeks have been full of the kind of stuff that tends to make you neglect even basic personal hygiene, let alone things like ‘decorating the house’ or ‘planning large meals’ or ‘shopping for presents.’

We had a rather important code deploy that went into integration testing on…wait for it…December 22. T’was the deploy before Christmas and all through the team, not a partner was idle, not a voice didn’t scream… (I know. I do not have a career in rhymes.)

I did not (technically) work on Christmas Eve…but I’ve still got forty hours billed for the week. So needless to say, I skidded into said Christmas Eve sideways and cussing. Because much to my surprise, it actually showed up on December 24! I mean you know REALLY. After all, the aforementioned deploy was supposed to have an initial deploy on December 15 (for internal tech team only), but that didn’t happen and then we were supposed to get our deploy on 12/20 but guess what? That didn’t happen either. Nor did the 21st, or the 22nd.

So it seems rather indecent of Christmas to show up right on time. It’s like Those People who don’t get the memo that you’re supposed to always be about twenty minutes (a.k.a., “fashionably”) late to social gatherings, and instead show up Johnny-on-the-spot to everything.

Therefore, this Christmas has gone by in a terrible rush. It has gone by with a huge sucking noise, in a blur of light and movement and noise. (Ooooooooh, the noise!)

People came and went. There were outings. There was cooking – lots and lots of it.

Then on Christmas Eve as we were shutting off the lights and heading for bed (at one in the morning, thank-you-very-much, HO HO HO), we had no cookies for Santa…because I didn’t get around to them. So I dug through the larder, found some tortilla chips and a jar of homemade salsa, broke out the ‘good’ cordial glasses and filled a dark green one up with Goldschlager for the jolly old elf.

I mean, hey. Everywhere he goes, milk and cookies, milk and cookies. A little jalapeno and cinnamon schnapps would make a nice change of pace, don’t you think?

And then three minutes a few hours later, {thud!} {scurry-scurry!} {WHISPER! WHISPER! WHISPER!} {knock-knock} “Mommydaddy? It’s Christmas!”

Really? Never would have guessed…

And then there was this kind of implosion. Time took off like a runaway horse. There were presents, and shouting, and running, and candy wrappers on the floor. I made pancakes (I think…at least, I was rinsing maple syrup off a bunch of plates this morning, which usually means something like pancakes happened), and then I was making all kinds of other things. Pumpkins became pumpkin pie (and a lot more pumpkin puree, too). A black-bottom pie was also made, because otherwise The Lady My Mother would disown me. All the little sweet potato “fingerlings” from our sweet potato harvest a couple weeks ago became a soufflé (next year, I don’t care if the kids do hate it, I’m putting the bourbon in…it was OK, but kind of bland without it).

A six pound rib roast from the steer Ashley raised (a very bright-eyed young lady in the Future Farmer’s of America, whose steer I bought at the junior livestock auction at the county fair this summer) went into the oven and became a juicy roast.

Here’s the funny thing: I didn’t plan well (or arguably, at all). At 9:00 this morning, I was still deciding what-all I thought I was going to get done. (A lot of things didn’t. Like, 98% of the cleaning that really ought to be done before you have people in your home.)

Two weeks ago, I didn’t have a single present purchased.

But this morning, there were presents under the tree, neatly wrapped in coordinated paper – each Denizen with his or her own design. (This helps to avoid mistakes when you’ve got a pre-literate or extremely excitable kid in the brood…we can show Captain Adventure which paper is ‘his’ and turn him loose without a whole lot of fear, whereas otherwise every time you take your eyeballs of him for even a second, he’ll be ripping into somebody else’s present in hopes that it’s his.)

This morning, I had a good rough idea of what I was going to be making, but no actual plan; what time which thing had to be in or out of an oven or on the stove, what order to do things in, and not a single slice of celery done in advance.

But a few hours later, we all sat down and ate ourselves silly.

And there was laughing and talking, and talking and laughing; the children were happy with their new toys, and everybody found something they liked at the table.

Christmas happened without a lot of planning and coordinating on my part, and it turned out great.

That’s what happens, I guess, when distinguishing a “special” day from a “normal” one becomes difficult, or impossible. Every day we laugh. Every day we love. We ignore each other’s dusty blinds and bland potatoes, we laugh and talk and drink our wine and admire the children’s artwork.

So when Christmas comes, there’s no man-made stress added to it. No terror in the event the wine got corked, or the roast comes out burnt, or the pie crust is inedible. No what will She think if the napkins aren’t folded just so, just right, or the coffee isn’t hand-picked by monks.

We’re the same bunch of nuts on Christmas as we are on June 5.

Which leaves a lot of room for the sacred to creep in, really, in all the moments freed up because we don’t need to feed each other’s neuroses.

So…may the returning of the light at this solstice-time warm and bless you, may the lengthening of days uplift you, may you see the hope of tomorrow, and tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that in each added moment of light we gain as we begin the slow climb from winter’s dark to summer’s light; may your God be with you, and bless you, and keep you well.

I hope your days are blessed, one and all, yesterday and today, tomorrow and always – Christmas day, or doomsday.

Hwyl fawr!

Let the bells ring out

The New Year is rapidly approaching. I know it’s time to go “home” now because everybody else has left the building long ago…not, mind you, that I am physically in the office to see it (I’m working from home today), but looking at the corporate instant messaging window showing all my most-used team members…yeah.

They’re all long gone, off to ready themselves for fancy and/or rowdy parties and champagne and finger foods and karaoke and staying up too late and sleeping until forced to get up by pets or children or an urgent need for the bathroom.

So I suppose it’s time for me to pack it in, pack it up, and go shower some attention on my adorable offspring – who have actually been awfully good today while I was working.

Thank you, Nintendo Wii.

Me, I’ll be sitting around in my jeans drinking Riesling (because that’s what we have on hand) while the kids bounce around like atomic-powered missiles trying to stay up until midnight just to prove they can (like they need to prove that).

Oh. And playing on the Wii whether I want to or not (believe it or not, I’d kind of rather not right now…I’m kinda tired and would rather do nothing more energetic than knitting a gauge swatch on some pink cashmere blend [mostly ‘blend,’ almost no cashmere]), because it turns out that the kids find it far more amusing to watch me play Raving Rabbids than to play it themselves.

I’m going to pretend it’s because I rock at it, and not because I look like a durn-fool while I’m shaking my aging booty trying to do the dancing part of the game. (Oy.)

I hope your New Year celebrations are exactly what you want them to be, as exciting or relaxing as you like them – that you come home from them safe and sound and ready to have a joy-filled, kick-butting, healthy, happy and prosperous 2010.

Onward…!