Christmas Foreplay

Halloween is over. Bring on Christmas!

(I know Thanksgiving is in there somewhere, but it's a hard holiday to get into. My parents are divorced, giving me two Thanksgivings ever single year. Neither of which I'm allowed to host, mostly because A.) I live hours from any one else and B.) at my Dad's house, I am fourth in the child pecking order.)

I both love November and hate it at the same time.

First of all, there's the weather. It snowed for the first time last night...just flurries mixed with rain, but enough to cause a small riot on Facebook and the local TV Weatherman to unroll his snow prediction for the season. (It's 64.8 inches, in case you care.)

It's still dark when I get out of bed, making getting out of bed really tough. It's dreary and ugly and just the word "November" makes me think of gray skies and soggy leaves clogging my gutters.

Which brings us to the love. With all the darkness and shitty weather, I get cozy inside with Christmas lights in my kitchen and a holiday candle on my table. Pandora asked me if I was F-ing Kidding when I pulled up a Christmas station. I got my Skinned Elmo robe on, a pair of slippers, and became my own modern-day Dickens novel.

Now, I get why people are upset with Christmas music and decorations at stores up before Halloween and Thanksgiving. It's not about the feeling of the season or brightening up an otherwise dreary day. It's about money, commercialization, capitalism, and the bottom line.

(This is a salesman's daughter talking. I am pro all those things, just not for public consumption in months that aren't December. Because my dad sold -and still sells- to all the stores for their Christmas gift-giving needs, our realization of Christmas was in July, and any family in retail knows that's absolute fact.)

Recently, this picture has been making its way around the internet:

Actually, I believe this was from last year, but I hear that Nordstrom's is doing it again this year. Things like this make Disgruntled Husband happy. He is a Christmas purist...no tree or decorations or music until after Thanksgiving.

The thing is, I don't want a tree. I don't want to bake cookies. I don't want to go shopping. Not yet. That stuff complicates things. Like most things in my life, I need a little downtime to process before the big show. Christmas is definitely no exception.

Plus, by the time Christmas Eve rolls around, I'm usually more than a little sick of holiday stuff, which makes packing up the tree and all of that much easier.

And it's socially acceptable to start going to my favorite Christmas website now. (I know I posted this last year. It's still my favorite.)

My DVD of The Family Stone is in my DVD player full time right now. It's a sad movie...if you haven't seen it 85 times and only watch for the set decorating and family dynamics. It's a Christmas movie, but not one that gets a lot of airtime on TV like my absolute favorite movie of all time....National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.

This year, I'll have to figure out either how to get the extra channels on my TV in my bedroom or where to find another cable box, because the Hallmark Channel moved from channel 36 to channel 78, and my TV only goes to 73. These are real things I worry about.

If you feel like I do, go light a candle (Yankee Candle Holiday Sage is my new favorite), tell Pandora to F herself, because it's Christmas to YOU and cue those sugar plums, because the hype and pain-in-the-ass ness that is December will suck your will to live, as well as your will to listen to Andy Williams and Mannheim Steamroller.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to try and answer the age old Christmas question: Why is Dan Fogelberg's Same Old Lang Syne a Christmas song?