When my heart finds Christmas...

It's the holiday season and I'm not sure if I've gotten there yet, despite that the retail establishments all seem to have gotten there as of November 1st. Why do they insist on getting out the Christmas decorations as soon as Halloween is done? For whatever it's worth, this is the time of year when I go into blitz mode and try to make about 20 things for gifts and whatnot before Christmas. Last year I made dresses for my twin nieces for their Christmas presents and ended up staying up until 3 am on the 24th in order to finish the second one so that I wouldn't have to bring the sewing machine to Pittsburgh with me. In hind sight, it was the smartest thing I did, though I was pregnant and already tired when I did it.

This year's holiday season started at Thanksgiving when the in-laws came here for the meal. Luckily for us they chose to stay elsewhere because there just is no room for my in-laws and my sister-in-law and the twins. I mean, I suppose we could make it work but it would involve several aerobeds and those are no fun to sleep on. Anyway, the real sewing blitz part of the season started the day after Thanksgiving when my sister-in-law informed me that the zipper on Ella's dress was broken and could I fix it. I thought that it would be no problem, since it was an invisible zipper and since they are coil zippers they are more easily re-set. Except the problem is bigger than that. They had such a problem with it - probably because they didn't know how to properly deal with it - that my father-in-law used pliers to yank the zipper pull off of the zipper. Now I don't just have to fix the zipper, I have to replace it. I don't mind doing it because I love the dress and I want my niece to be able to wear it. But it's just one more thing on my list, and as it is, I'm way behind.

See, I wanted this year to be a little different. I wanted to enjoy the holidays with my kids and spend time baking and doing things with them rather than hounding them to clean up their rooms, etc. And while I have the best of intentions, things don't seem to happen the way I want them to. We were going to make a gingerbread house last weekend but didn't get around to doing it for one reason and another. So the dough got made on Monday or Tuesday, rolled out, cut out and baked on Wednesday and will be put together and decorated this weekend some time. Plus, the girls really want to make Christmas cookies - 5 kinds or so. I can handle that, because they'll get bored after a bit and just leave me to do it and that's okay because I don't have to take time out to explain and supervise them. Anyway, baking is on the list of things to do.

Then there's the gift list. I'm embarrassed to say that I have something that I've been making for Scott for about 10 years now. It got put away and then I got started on it again last year and I thought I'd get it finished. Chances are I won't. But there are other, more pressing projects that need to get done that are way behind schedule as well. Like the SWAP for Maeve, which should have been done a couple of months ago but got waylaid by my tendonitis. I keep thinking of gifts to make for her and for Gwyn, but Scott keeps reminding me that Maeve really needs the clothes from the SWAP plan. They're all cut out. It's merely a question of being able to sit down and just sew massive amount of stuff at a time.

So now I feel rushed. And when I'm driving around town on errands, I listen to Christmas CDs. But somehow I feel sort of unmoved by the idea of Christmas this year. Maybe it's that almost no one in our neighborhood has decorations or lights up. I know that a lot of people have chosen not to put up holiday lights because the electric bills are already high enough and the economy is poor. And there is no snow to make it feel like December. But it makes me wistful for the Christmases from when I was a child. At least we have a tree ( I got it on Tuesday) and it makes the house smell like Christmas. And we're going to decorate the house tomorrow. So maybe, with some decorations and a little hot chocolate I'll be able to find Christmas. It's got to be here somewhere.