7ToF: Christmas preparations and a hat trick of faults

1. I've had a really bad attitude about Christmas the past couple of years. It wasn't always that way--I used to look forward to Christmas all year. I have more boxes of Christmas decorations than I am willing to admit, and I'm more sentimentally attached to most of them than I am to many items that decorate our house all year long.

Then the kids grew up and I got grumpier and Christmas took a left turn into something that was more obligation than joy. But for some reason this year I'm looking forward to it again. I voluntarily put Christmas music on a couple of days ago. Ding a ling.

2. But Mel won't be home from Seattle until around the 20th, and we are torn about waiting for her before we get a tree and put up the decorations, or doing it without her. She's already told us it's OK if we go ahead before she gets home, but the thing is, the three of us are boring as hell without her. I don't think she gets that she's the life of the party in this family. I think we decided to wait to get the tree, but I am going to get out the decorations one box at a time and do the rest of it gradually.

3. Speaking of being boring as hell, this set of 17 graphs that describe introverts was making the rounds on social media last week. A couple of them were so accurate for me that they made me laugh out loud (#11)(the host's dog! that is so true!)(and 15 and 16). If you're a fellow introvert, or if you have loved ones that are, definitely worth checking out. A couple of the graphs don't exactly fit me, but the only really false note is the subtitle of the article-- "You say party o'clock, I say bedtime"-- which makes no sense since most introverts I know are night owls. We're just doing interesting things at home instead of partying.

4. I am not a punctual person. I blame it on my southern roots. Time was flexible when I was growing up. An invitation to dinner at 7 meant you should show up at 7:20. On a recent visit to my mom's church, at 10:10 there were still people, lots of people, streaming into the ten o'clock service.

But I live in an area that is not southern, and people around here are decidedly punctual. If you are on time, you are late. My lack of punctuality annoys people. I know this, but it hasn't been enough to change my ways. It's not that I don't care about people or the event I'm late for or anything like that, it's just that I'm at home and I'm writing a blog post or reading or doing laundry and I'm thinking and not really paying attention to the clock, and before you know it, I'm late. Again. Even though I was determined not to be this time.

5. Being late leads to stress, because I know I've annoyed people and I know I should do better. I get really angry at myself when I (for the millionth time), look at the clock and suddenly realize that no matter how fast I get ready, there's no way I'm going to be on time. So I'm discovering, at this late date, that a surprising (to me) part of self-care is figuring out a new method so that I'm not always running late.

Example: It's a minimum 12-minute drive from our house to town--that's if traffic is light, the road conditions are good, you catch all the lights, etc. Since I can get to town in 12 minutes, for some reason I assume that I will always be able to. But the truth is it almost always takes longer than that--and at 5 p.m. on snowy roads, it can take twice that long. So I'm working on this. I'm working to change my base assumption of when I need to leave the house. I've only done it a few times, but already I can tell that if I can be consistent about this, it will save lots of emotional wear and tear since I'm not driving along railing at myself for being late again and getting upset about every red light.

6. So, I've confessed to being boring and habitually late, I might as well complete the trifecta and turn you off entirely. I'm also messy. I prefer to think of this as having a high tolerance for personal chaos, but in his more frustrated moments, Doug would probably just go ahead and say I'm a slob. Actually, he wouldn't say that, he's way too nice, but he'd be thinking it.

Anyway. The thing is, I don't mind a certain amount of clutter as long as I know where things are. It may be a bit chaotic, but it's usually fairly organized chaos. Then after a couple of weeks of floating around in my thinking space and letting things go, suddenly I'll realize that the pile on the counter is getting alarmingly large, and then I'll sort of wake up and look around and realize I haven't paired clean socks in awhile, etc etc. And then I tear around for a couple of hours and re-organize everything.

OK, maybe that only happens once a month.

That has always worked fairly well for me, even if it does make Doug a bit demented, but now I have a 54-year-old brain. I used to have a pretty good idea of exactly what was in that pile of stuff on the counter, but now, as soon as I put something down, I forget about it. I can't remember where anything is from one minute to the next. So another new part of my self-care routine: shortening the interval between re-organizing sprees down to every few days, maybe once a week. I'm not sure this one is going to work. but it does give me a definite feeling of satisfaction to clear off the counter.

You know, if you've waded through all of this, you deserve a break. Two of these are long enough that I could have made them into their own posts. I'm only doing six of my seven things this week. I'm done.

Hugs and love and thanks for stopping by. Have a great weekend.