“I think I’ve been…

"I think I've been pretty clear about how it is that I like to get through the holidays. I find that the more I do in advance, the more organized I am, the more that I engage in this time of year like it's "Operation Ho Ho" than a holiday, the better a time I have. Ironically, since I started pulling this thing together with a list and a schedule and a real sense of how much work it is, we look a lot more like a family and less like a group of shattered people helplessly wrapping things at midnight while silently holding each other responsible for the nightmare it's all become again.

So far, so good this year. There's a tree up in the living room. It's naked, but it's there, and thanks to the system, it is exactly the right height. (We started taking a measuring tape to the tree place, which sounds obsessive and weird, but it's a lot less weird than having a tree that won't fit and hacking bits off of it with a strange old saw while trying not to have Christmas argument #4 - Working Title: Why do you care so much about the height of the tree/What is wrong with you that the tree has to be a specific height.)"

-- Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

It's nice when you meet a kindred soul. I don't have a formal Christmas schedule written out yet, but it strikes me as a brilliant idea, and one that I should implement immediately.

- day after Thanksgiving: clean up, take down Thanksgiving decor
- weekend after Thanksgiving: get tree, put up tree, bring all the decor boxes from the basement,
decorate, get boxes back to basement (I was slow on this last part this year, mostly 'cause Kevin had gone out of town, and it stressed me out unduly, having gazillion green plastic bins strewn around my kitchen)
- by following weekend: decorate outside of house with lights (still working on this, but hopefully by tomorrow this will be done)
- second week of December: make holiday cookies (starting today)
- etc. and so on.

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