Let's Not Panic About Christmas

MomQueenElizabeth, ready for Christmas

I can tell you the exact moment when I started to panic about Christmas this year. I even blogged about it. It was December 4, and I had suddenly realized that I had done nothing at all to get ready for Christmas, and that I was leaving on a four-day vacation the following day.

Woe! I cried to myself, and to you. Woe! Woe! Woe! Christmas is ruined!

Okay, before you read even one more word, I want you to click over to Swistle and read her Soothing Holiday Words post. I'll wait right here.

All done? Isn't that completely great? She nailed down what I've been feeling recently: Christmas expectations are not assigned to me by others, they are self-imposed, so I can remove those expectations as I see fit.

On the way back from our vacation in Smoke Sin City I mentally categorized what is important to me about this season and what is not important, just so I could gauge how panicked I should be this week. I was ruthless in putting holiday-related expectations into those two categories. I discovered that both lists are comfortingly short.

These things are important: Spending time with my family and friends, having a Christmas tree and stockings out, baking peppernuts, having a present under the tree for each member of my family, listening to my favorite seasonal music, taking time to savor the moments.

These things are not important: Everything else. That includes baking and making candy, having a perfect Christmas morning with all of the traditions observed, finding the PERFECT present for each and every person, and shopping in actual stores.

So I started checking items off my list.

Tree up? Check. Two hours on Sunday night and it was done.

Presents for each member of the family? Check. Ordered last night, and blessings of the season to you, Amazon.com.

Listening to my favorite seasonal music? Check. On it even as I sit here.

Peppernuts? In progress, and will be done by the weekend. 

That leaves only spending time with my family and friends, and by paring down my "important things" list, I've left myself TWELVE WHOLE DAYS for this most important thing, and that will give me time to savor the moments as the Boys drift in and out of the House on the Corner over the next few weeks.

Oh, I'll probably do a few more things, maybe get our Christmas cards out before the end of the year, knit a few more inches onto my mother-in-law's gift, possibly even rig up that card-holder I bought the supplies for and didn't finish. Or maybe not. No one will be disappointed (or surprised) if I do none of those things, and I will be happier and less irritable and more fun to be around. 

I feel like the elf who saved Christmas.

It Still Felt Good

When we got back from VEGAS, BABY! there was no food in the house. Well, not quite literally. The pantries are crammed with canned goods and the freezer is full of half a beef, but the refrigerator echoed with the lack of anything healthy or applicable to our new cholesterol-improving lifestyle. Also, we were out of salsa.

So I went to the grocery store, and because I needed some ribbon and a lampshade, I went to the Big Box where I filled a cart with good-for-us food. Then I got in line to check out.

Check-out lines at the Big Box are especially bad at this time of the year, particularly in the hour between office-closings and suppertime, but just after I joined the queue this line stopped cold. The woman ready to pay at the register apparently did not have enough money, and she was confounded as to what to do.

"MomQueenBee," I thought to myself, "you came back from Las Vegas with money. Also, you got to go to Las Vegas in the first place, and this woman can't afford to pay for new underwear." (Yes, judgmental me had checked to make sure she wasn't buying cigarettes, because after last week I realize Kansas is a pretty wonderful smoke-free-ish place.) So I handed the clerk a $5 bill to make up the difference, the woman thanked me profusely, and the line began to move again.

It was not a big deal, and I didn't think much about it until my cart-load of vegetables and yogurt had been scanned through and the clerk announced the total.

"That will be $73," she said.

Whoa. That was an enormous load of vegetables and yogurt--obviously God had seen me giving that woman her early Christmas present, and in a cast-your-bread-upon the waters moment had DIVINELY LOWERED ALL THE PRICES. It was a Christmas miracle!

I felt wonderful all the way home, through the unloading of the groceries, through supper, until halfway through the evening when I suddenly thought of something. Because the checking out had taken so long I hadn't even really looked at the receipt--I'd already swiped my debit card and I just tucked the receipt into my wallet for recording later.

Oh. Turns out the total was $173, which was not at all out of line with what I had expected to pay. I laughed at myself--but I still felt good about the shopping experience.

Feeling good about a Christmas-season shopping experience? I believe I did experience a Christmas miracle; it just wasn't the one I originally thought I was seeing.

Leaving Las Vegas

I am guessing that most people, when they see this sign, are just getting off a plane and think "Well, I'm glad I'm not THERE anymore." I, on the other hand, was glad to see the message at o'dark-thirty Saturday morning because it meant that we were reversing our travel process and that in a few hours we would be in Kansas again.

Oh, it's not that we didn't have a lovely time. I hope that when Husband and I are 94 years old and toddling together into the special needs pre-seating line we will enjoy traveling together as much as we do now. I'm crossing my fingers that we'll still be rolling our eyes together at the women who carry dogs in their purses, and that he still will be gallantly offering me the aisle seats and hogging the armrests. I do love traveling with Husband, but I think we're crossing Las Vegas off our bucket list and calling it done.

Here are the things I wasn't so crazy about in VEGAS, BABY!:

The smokers. Oh, my holy heaven, the smokers. You know how movies show the shadowy underworld figures fighting to control Vegas's gambling trade, or the prostitution traffic? I'd go for the cigarette concession. Coming from a state where smokers are pretty much politely excused from public places, and where all my smoking friends are extremely considerate of those of us who don't indulge, the lack of both of those niceties was glaringly evident, even through the haze.

Also, I REALLY disliked the guys on every street corner who handed out pictures of nekkid ladies. Whoa. I know I'm a prude. In fact, I could probably be the Church Lady's double if the Church Lady ever made a movie ("Could it be...SATAN?") but I usually am able to accept local customs and mores. Except in this case, when I was holding Husband's left hand as they were pushing photographs of bazooms into his right hand. DO NOT DO THAT, GUYS.

Here are the things I was crazy about in Las Vegas:

The hotel room. Seriously, it was wonderful, and the bed made me think little bluebirds of happiness had plumped the pillows and pulled up the (high thread count) sheets. The fainting couch (yes!) was perfect for watching television and knitting, which is probably why Husband left me there early in the morning to go to his tax seminar and found me still there when he returned after discussing 1040s and sheltered dividends all day.

Also, the hotel itself, which was not so swanky as to make us feel like country mice (I'm looking at you, Wynn Las Vegas) and not so filled with black-hatted cowboys (the National Professional Rodeo was in town) as to make us feel like Thurston and Lovey Howe. Boy#2 laughed when I confessed my discomfort with either end of the social spectrum. "That could be part of the family crest: Solidly and proudly middle class," he said.

So we're back from VEGAS, BABY. We came out $3 ahead on our $10-ish investment in nickel slots, and saved the money we might have spent seeing Carrot Top. (I know. It was a struggle to make THAT decision.)

We're in Kansas again, and there's no place like home.

More Craziness From VEGAS, BABY!

 

I seem to be incapable of saying the name of this place as anything except its nickname, in all caps, followed by the English word for a small infant, also in all caps, followed by an exclamation point. What is it about this place that drives me to such paroxysms of shoutiness?

Well, maybe it's the price of the ONE BANANA (whoops, there I go again) that was my breakfast. Seriously, Las Vegas? I realize it's not Tuesday, when bananas are 19 cents a pound in Small Town, but one hundred and thirty five pennies for ONE BANANA? (Ask anyone from Small Town how much bananas cost on Tuesdays and they'll know it's 19 cents per pound.)

I spent my first day of my Sin City vacation exactly as I had hoped, watching a completely creepy and wonderful series on Netflix (thank you, Boy#1, for opening my eyes to Damages) and knitting four inches onto the afghan I hope to have done by Christmas. It was wonderful, except for the 90 minutes I spent on Apple Care support after I updated my iPhone and it no longer made or received calls, but thank you, Apple Care, all good now!

Then Husband got out of his tax seminar and we were off to experience the wild and crazy VEGAS, BABY nightlife.

As it turns out, we are super-terrible at being wild and crazy.

We sat down at the penny slots with our $26 worth of coins and proceeded to lose $2. We looked at each other, bug-eyed. It was not going the way we had scripted, which was that we were going to put in six nickels and win several thousand dollars. So we managed to make ourselves play $3 worth at the quarter slots, and won enough to get back our initial investment throwing-away-of-money, so we cashed out. As we walked back across the bridge Husband dropped our roll dimes into the basket sitting beside a young man flanked by two little girls whose sign said they needed money for rent. I know, I know, panhandlers often are just scamming tenderhearts and drive back to their houses in the suburbs in BMWs. But whether those three young people were or were not con artists, they certainly needed our dimes more than the casino did, so we felt like winners.

So, having escaped the one-armed grip of the slot machines, we walked down to the Mirage and watch the "volcano eruption" that happens every hour on the hour, where hundreds of tourists gather to watch the spectacle on the tiny screens of the cell phones they are holding between their actual eyes and the spectacles. Really, people? You think you will get such spectacular footage of this that you must STORE IT ON YOUR PHONE rather than in your memory? Huh.

And finally, we enjoyed the lights and Christmas trees and reminders of the season, because nothing gives homage to this sacred time of the year like a statue of Ceasar draped in tinsel.

But that's VEGAS, BABY!

How to Pack for Las Vegas

 

Please excuse the quality of the photo on today's post. This is actually yesterday's post, but by the time I snapped the fuzzy image above we had been trains-planes-and-automobiling (minus the trains) for about 12 hours and I was starting to feel pretty close to what that shot looks like: fuzzy and not quite centered.

But we're in VEGAS, BABY!

Yup, Husband and I left Small Town behind yesterday and headed west for a convention of tax accountants. (On a side note, is there any more cognitively dissonant pair than "tax accountants" and "Sin City"? No, I thought not.) Because I am a PARTY ANIMAL, I packed up my books and knitting and came along to sit in the hotel room and finish some Christmas presents and catch up on Arrested Development using my free month of Netflix. Envy my wild and crazy nature, all you wild and crazy people out there.

We flew through Dallas and Las Angeles, which oddly enough, look exactly alike if you don't leave the airport. Exactly. Alike. But when we got to Vegas we knew we were in a distinctly different place. That's because the signs said "Welcome to Las Vegas!" Oh, and there were slot machines waiting the second we got off the plane because apparently there are some folks who can't wait even three minutes to sit down and start offloading cash. 

Husband and I aren't really what you'd call big gamblers. This is not because we think it's wrong per se  (although I could give you a pretty good argument about how it preys on the folks who can least afford to lose money, and how expecting something for nothing IS wrong, etc.) but because we're cheap. We are so cheap that the thought of simply inserting coins into a slot and watching them disappear seems like the nth degree of stupidity and makes us break out in hives.

But it seems kind of...ungrateful? unpatriotic? unnatural? to come all the way to the gambling capital of the world without participating in the local custom. So as we dithered about whether or not we could bring ourselves to throw away good American currency, I had a brilliant idea. 

We had planned to check a bag containing our coats, extra books, spare socks,apples for in case we got hungry, etc., and American Airlines was going to relieve us of $26 for the privilege of carrying our surplus stuff across the country. Instead, we left the books and socks at home, and Husband came out of the bank with this in his hand:

Wooo! $26 worth of coins for the slot machines. The sum total of our gambling money. (Plus one dime Husband found on the floor of the airport shuttle.)

Of course, this morning I discovered that slot machines don't actually take coins so I may be coming home with all of these rolls still in my purse.Who says I'm not a complete winner?

Stay tuned for more updates from VEGAS, BABY!

It's Beginning to Look Nothing at All Like Christmas

File photo, obviously.

So, are you all ready for Christmas at your house? Tree trimmed? Lights lit? Stockings all hung by the chimney with care?

Here at the House on the Corner we can count the number of things we've done to get ready for Christmas on two fingers. Those two fingers are the index finger and the thumb, and to count the actual accomplishments you first have to hold those fingers tip to tip, then read the resulting number. We have done zero things. NOTHING.

I'm blaming the lack of outward and visible signs of the season on the early Thanksgiving. On a normal year, when Thanksgiving falls within striking distance of the end of November, it stands to reason that you have to step lively while the turkey carcass is still in the refrigerator or all of the Yuletime preps will not be completed on time. This year, as I made cranberry sauce practically the day after Independence Day, I was thinking "Well, with a whole week after Thanksgiving before November is even over, I'll have lots and lots of time to relax and really go into Christmas organized."

Ha! Instead, I spent a few days just giggling to myself because we were getting a Lovely Girl in the family, then another few days thinking that I really should be getting my shopping done while FREE SHIPPING! was all over the internet, then a few days watching Boy#3 in his final marching band moments and wahoo-ing because WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS OF THE WORLD (according to the song played pretty much non-stop during the final minutes of the game) and hey! Here I am with absolutely nothing done for Christmas.

Well, that's not strictly true. I have pinned a good many crafts on my Pinterest board and intend to complete all of them in the next 22 days. I'm going to do this and this and this and quite possibly this. (I'm not even linking the pins of homemade gifts that I'm going to be working on, because maybe one of those gifts is for YOU!)

Or perhaps I will fall back on the habits I've established during my first half-century-plus of life, and throw some decorations at the tree, bake some peppernuts, enjoy my family, and call it a great holiday.

Yes, that's definitely the new plan for this year same plan that has served me well.

Ho, ho, ho!

What Do You Say?

Suppose you are just a little (or a lot) late getting dressed in the morning and you're hurrying up the stairs to take your shower and one hand is holding up your too-long-but-oh-so-cuddly bathrobe to keep it from tripping you and killing you in a fall down the stairs and the other hand is holding your too-full-but-oh-so-delicious triple-shot cappuccino which you'll sip as you dry your hair after you get out of the shower and as you fly up the steps you are thinking to yourself "pick up your feet, pick up your feet, pick up your feet" because you have on your slippers and they aren't exactly precision footwear and you truly don't want to fall down these stairs and break your neck or something more important but on the LAST STEP you catch your toe on the lip of the step and while you don't fall down the stairs and break your neck or something more important you do slop coffee all over the floor and even though you know nothing is ruined (thank you, hardwood floors, for being impervious to triple-shot cappuccinos) the episode is so surprising and annoying that a word flies out of your mouth before you even think about what you are about to say.

What is that word?

My word, I now know, is "dangnation." That's pronounced with the emphasis on the middle syllable (dang-NA-shun) and with much vehemence. Much, much vehemence. In fact, so much vehemence that I am quite glad the word that flew out was G-rated. DANG-NA-SHUN.

Please recreate this scenario, then tell me what your word is so that I can feel all morally superior to persons who were not lucky enough to have four little pitchers with big ears around to parrot back any words said with vehemence over the past 26 years.

Or rather, don't tell me. I don't want to see my morally superior vocabulary blush.