It’s here, and I’m feeling good about Christmas now. As a professional service retailer, it’s tough to have the Christmas spirit when all of November and December you’re under extreme pressure to get an overload of work finished at once. There’s little time to prepare for your own Christmas, and it’s just not the same to try to think about that in October. As always, I do indeed have a Christmas tree—I knew I couldn’t live through the holiday without one. It’s a rather garish green fiber-optic thing that just plugs in and reminds one of a late-night diner’s flickering “OPEN” sign, but it’s the best I could do this year. Now I can feel good about wrapping presents, and forget the customers who didn’t show up to pick up their framing while I worked with glass-cut and wire-punctured stiff fingers to get it done. And since I’m finally in the Christmas spirit, I won’t even tack on the extra rush-charges. Many of the people who did show up left with their stuff and a smile, and a promise to pay because I hadn’t had time to write up sales slips. So don’t think that all retailers look at the holiday season as a financial windfall.
We will visit with family and friends, and make more Christmas memories together. Tonight I will hang one single golden ornament on the 4-ft. tree and lay under it and make faces at it and dream. And next week, I will bake Christmas cookies and read.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
Hopefully now you will have some time for relaxation and rest. Enjoy baking those cookies.
I, too, will be baking Christmas cookies for New Years – and they will taste better for being rolled and cut without deadlines and stress. After which, I will relax with my new Jane Austen Collection of Novels, and at night, I will sit on the bench in my garden which is beautifully dressed and lit for the season. There is nothing quite like the solitariness of a Connecticut winter night. Joanne
Thankfully my sister whet my appetite for those cookies by giving me some of the 77 dozen she’d baked (we used to clean out and refill with cookies two kitchen cabinets when we still lived at home!). I’m starting with the cookie-covered hershey kiss recipe, then there’s one for chocolate biscotti with dried cherries…