foolish fire

Okay kids, I admit it. I’m probably not a contender this year for the It’s a Wonderful Life Holiday Sportmanship Award.

But in my own defense, I submit the following compelling excuses…

1. My mom got sick and almost didn’t make it to Christmas, seriously. Fortunately she got better and is resting up in a Nursing Home/Rehab place (no, not THAT kind of rehab) and should be back home this week. But it was definitely touch and go there for a while.
2. The Christmas budget this year was, shall we say, compromised a bit by the fact we’ve been “scrooged” by a few of our clients.


Okay so that’s enough stress right there to cause “naughty” to kick the crap out of “nice” but wait there’s more…

3. I decided this year I would make all my gifts this year (thus saving precious financial and planetary resources at the same time taking a stand for non-commercialism), which would’ve been fine if the one machine I needed to pull that off (my trusty Epson 2200 6-color printer) hadn’t decided to deposit a mysterious black splotch on everything I sent through it. Fortunately I had the foresight to make prints of all my favorite illos a while back so I used them as a Plan B even though I wasted nearly an entire shopping day in Troubleshooting Hell trying to fix the printer. I concluded after much Googling and Wiki-ing and gnashing of teeth that the cats are to blame. This actually could be true. They like to sleep on the printer. Hey…it’s warm.
4. The Annual Post-Thanksgiving Constipated Kitchen Drain Phenomenon happened right on schedule…. and we didn’t even host Thanksgiving at our house this year! It’s a miracle! And because Dr. Seuss designed our plumbing, whenever the kitchen sink gets clogged, it overflows into the master bathtub, depositing whatever is queued up waiting to go down the garbage disposal around my wife’s ankles. So not wanting to shell out $200 on a plumber a few days before Christmas, I found myself at Home Depot shelling out $40 for a snake thingy, which amazingly….worked, thus saving Christmas! Huzzah!
5. Simultaneously, the youngest daughter who is currently residing with us because she’s “between life transitions” and who is about to go on a cruise to Puerta Vallarta with LA boyfriend’s family is having pain in her jaw, which after a visit to her childhood dentist turns out to be caused by a tooth that once housed a filling that blah, blah, blah, blah……….root canal. Estimated cost: $1,100.00. Likely daughter contribution to same: $0. So now I’m looking up venture capitalists with holiday hours in the Yahoo Yellow Pages and finding myself saddled with that age-old conundrum of setting parental limits vs. helping a kid who’s just starting out when it occurs to me that…hey, “I” want to go to Puerta Vallarta and swim with the Humpback whales in the Sea of Frickin’ Cortez and I’d be a HELLUVA lot more open to helping finance her root canal if it wasn’t to provide her with a pain-free cruise! Without going into the boring details, this situation is 90% resolved. The cruise was saved. Thank god (he said snidely).

So that’s my list and I’ve checked it twice and yes…I believe it does provide legal grounds for being a tad bit crabby and perhaps making the odd snippy comment about not being able to record the Manchester United match because the DVR is 90% full of Christmas shows (thanks, writers strike!). And exacerbating the whole thing is my wife’s unnatural level of “cheer” that starts just after Thanksgiving and lasts until the last ornament is packed and relegated to the attic just after New Years Day, if she has her way. I, on the other hand, always advocate the de-Christmas-ing commence the day after Christmas, claiming the tree is by now a lethal, ticking incendiary device, a tactic which has worked in the past, but not this year, I’m afraid. This year, I owe her. And I admit, my “grinchiness”, as I prefer to call it…my wife having other, less flattering ways to describe the phenomenon, is not easy to live with.

So I have apologized for my whole “glass of egg nog half empty” attitude this season. So the tree is still up as I write this. And though it is indeed a ticking time bomb in it’s current desiccated state I’ve not made a stink about it. Or the victorian Santa still on the mantle or the glass snowflakes still in the window, or the wreath she made from our backyard trees on the front door. And of course there is still plenty of evidence that a hand-made gift workshop invaded the dining room for the better part of two weeks so that will need to be cleaned up. But all in due time. Because my mom will be going back home in a few days with a pretty good prognosis, and it’s been a few days since youngest daughter and boyfriend left on their cruise and the house is delightfully quiet again, and there have been no plumbing emergencies to speak of, and one of our clients just paid us, and I’m still feeling the laughter hangover from our Annual Holiday Movie Day with our family and friends (4 movies in one day..seriously)….so I’m just starting to get some Christmas Spirit up in here, alright?