‘Twas the night post Thanksgiving,
And all through the house
Were boxes of Christmas crap,
The mess made me grouse.

Ha. You thought I was doing an entire post in verse, didn’t you (unless, of course, you have the power of scanning ahead to see that in a mere four lines I switched to prose)? Ain’t nobody got time for ripping off Christmas poems.

As for the grousing, I have great guilt over that. I love decorating for Christmas, but I hate doing so with children. Hate it. Kids, it seems, want to touch everything. And they want to discuss, at decibels typically reserved for Metallica concerts, all the things they are touching.

“Where are our stockings? I pulled all the things out of this box, and nope, no stockings yet!”
“What is this? Is it glass? If I drop it will it break?”
“Jingle bells. I found jingle beeeeelllllssss! I’m ringing the bells. RINGING THEM!”

I want to make moments, memories. And maybe – MAYBE – if I scheduled decorating on a day when everyone is well-rested, things would go differently. Maybe. I don’t know, however, when that circumstance will occur, since I believe we have two choices: 1) Have a full life, leaving us short-ish on time (and, sometimes, on sleep); or 2) There is no other choice.

Therefore, instead of a moment, I made a movie of the week. It’s a cautionary tale about mothers who cannot keep their shit together when small people are tearing through their carefully packed boxes of ornaments and festive vase fillers.

As much as I want to honor Thanksgiving, the second it’s over I want it to be Christmas. With Thanksgiving falling so late this year, it was more important than ever to get our Christmas on and get it on right now. No matter that I’d spent two days in the kitchen (after spending a week literally cleaning the skin off my hands, thanks to a short-lived, but still terrifying, stomach bug for the seven year old. I could not face the possibility of sharing that bug with our Thanksgiving house guests, so I cleaned, and cleaned, and cleaned, and the skin peeled off my fingers, but that’s a post for another day).

No matter that I was cooked and cleaned out. The carnage of a Thanksgiving feast had to be cleaned up to make way for the carnage of Christmas décor. And, apparently, I was too overtired to make it a moment.

I want to play it cool. I want to hide my suburban Mommy Dearest mode from you and from my family. I know, intellectually anyway, that none of this matters. Whether my house is decorated or not has no bearing on Christmas, on what it’s all about. I freaking love Christmas decorations, though. I love creating a place for my family to celebrate the season. I don’t care if it makes me look like a Stepford Wife.

What I do care about is that it makes me act like a lunatic until everything is in its place, all the boxes returned to storage until January 2 (when I begin to hate the very decorations I so dearly loved just a month prior, but again, another post). Why can’t I be cooler? Why can’t I be that easy going woman I want to be, the one who lets her kids do holiday crafts inside the house and doesn’t care if the ornaments break?

I don’t know. I have no answers. Do you? Really. I’m asking. How do you handle getting ready for the holidays without losing your mind?

(Meanwhile, once it’s all decorated and the chaos of boxes is cleared away, I do think I return to my mostly calm self. I love for friends and family to be comfortable here. As long as no kids run or play ball in the vicinity of the trees, that is. But really, I’m so chill now. Really. Stop touching that, please. Stop. Now. It’s breakable, dammit! Now let’s get back to chilling and enjoying the season, shall we?)