I HEART CHRISTMAS

Christmas is the best. Christmas is awesome. Christmas brings out the best in everyone. I really heart Christmas. Really.
This is what I keep telling myself. Even when everything is crumbling around me. When I’m getting sucked down into the abyss I call my sometimes life.
When my car is parked in my driveway, impotent and menacing. Smelling of burnt something and refusing to start. And I just don’t have the dough to fix it and now I live outside town and what the hell am I supposed to do to get around now that Christmas holidays are here? What do I do with the kids? Next week when they all want to go in to town to shop or see their friends or hang out , what do I do?
Breathe. I heart Christmas.
Plus, my lap top is down for the count. The very same lap top that protects under lock and key that which is most sacred to me, other than people and stuff. My book. My nearly completed manuscript that I think I’m finally starting to genuinely like. The thing I’ve been working on for years, and changing and fixing and editing. But not backing it up…I don’t like to back things up. Seems common. Cheap, really. I’m above all that.
So now the fate of my lap top is out of my hands. I can’t work on anything. I can’t get into pictures of my kids or edit my book or play Solitaire. And I was getting really good at Solitaire too (yes, I get the double meaning). Potentially hundreds of pages of work, years of my life, could be gone. I might be able to salvage the general gist of things, but most of it will be lost. It turns out I can only be clever once, there are no second chances.
In through the nose, out through the mouth. I still heart Christmas.
My kids made lists this year of what they wanted for Christmas. One of them – and Ben, don’t worry, I won’t say who – had a list totaling about $1000. There were just four or five things on the list. When I asked him (calmly and with great love) to get a freaking grip and remember that our family is referred to as ‘the working poor’, he said ‘Fine, just get me some shaving stuff or something’. Which in teen-speak means, ‘You are a rotten mother and when you are old and grey I will never visit you. You have ruined my life. Again.’
STILL. I. HEART. CHRISTMAS.
There’s so much we’re not going to be able to do this year. My gifts for the kids…lackluster at best. I’ve barely baked a thing, haven’t had a Christmas get-together yet and the dog keeps looking at me funny like she’s plotting something. We haven’t gone to church once. I can’t believe I just admitted that. My bank account – what can I say about my bank account? LOL, I guess. I’m already thinking about the yawning chasm that is the week between Christmas and New Year’s for me, when the boys all leave and I lie on the couch, watching romantic comedies and crying about my sad life. Something that is funny in the movies but awful and tragic in real life.
But still…still. The boys are off this week. We’re having friends over on the weekend. Mama’s giant box of Christmas goodness just arrived from California. She manages to take care of us all, even from far away. And that woman can shop like nobody’s business. I can’t wait to see what she got me.
I’ll bake while watching ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’. I'll pretend I'm Mary Bailey and there is someone out there who loves me like George loves her. I’ll finish up little bits of things and wrap presents. We’ll have friends over to toboggan on Christmas Eve. Maybe see the Festival of Lights one more time with hot chocolate and mittens. Because this year, regardless of what’s going wrong and what’s just never going to go right…
I heart Christmas.
Merry Christmas to all of you.