A Bit of Sanity after the Annual Nuttiness

Listening to: Random Hindi on the ipod

I know some people really love the holidays. Like look forward to them all year. I happen to not be one of them. I’m not Scrooge with the bah humbug stuff, I like the holidays fine. I just don’t LOOOOVVVEEE them. One of the reasons I don’t salivate over the holidays is that every year, the craziness gets ratcheted up a notch. With 1 birthday right before Thanksgiving and 1 right after, the holidays around here last from Halloween until New Years. It’s a long time. The decorations and trees come out a week earlier every year, the amount of people coming and going from our house increases, the decorations seem to increase every year like they’re having ornament orgies in the basement the whole year.   So with a (very quiet, lest I be accused of being said Grinch by my kids) sigh of relief, I have finished packing up all of the holiday paraphernalia and am completely ready to shove it back in the back corner of the basement under the stairs again. I am so ready to have my living room back to a semblance of order without the visual chaos that is a tree laden in trinkets, candles, and “stuff” set out on every flat surface. I love the holidays, but I love being able to pack up the craziness too.

Another beautiful thing after the holidays is shipping the kids back off to school every day. I love spending time with my kids, and I do enjoy the holidays for that reason, but heaven help me, I love the quiet and the school schedule that settles back over our house after the holidays. I’ve never been good at developing our own schedule at home and have really welcomed the schedule that school seems to bring. When the kids are home, life develops into a loosely scheduled free for all that usually includes way too many electronic gadgets. So the quiet of not having 2 kids at home, it’s a beautiful thing.

I think for the first time in my life, I actually got burnt out on having people coming and going at our house. I absolutely love having people over, feeding them, entertaining them, etc. For the first time in my life, I honestly wished I was a hermit that could go ignore the world in my cave. The last house guest who came over and stayed for a week broke the camel’s back so to say. Or perhaps it was the flu that I conveniently got right before she came over…. She was family, so un-inviting her was just not to be done. Anyhow, there has been a moratorium on people coming over. I am refusing to wash sheets, cook for a crowd, or drink too much until at least mid Jan. Sanity must return first.  As I’ve previously made clear, I’m really, really bad at finding limits, and I think I’ve found my people limit. I guess that’s good info to get to know once. Kinda like when I drank an obscene amount of alcohol just to understand my limits. Now I know, let’s not do that again.

Overall, we survived, and probably got some good karma forging some better relationships with family and friends.  But seriously, thank you jeebus that it’s January!