A Scarlett Kind of Christmas

There's got to be a name for it... that blissful, bittersweet space of time in between all the presents being opened and getting back to work. Everyone lays about like so many stuffed sausages, deliriously happy, exhausted, glad it's over but then sad. The Moms get a bit forlorn when they think about all the mess that's got to be cleaned up, with no motivated helpers to be found. 

There's this tension that begins to awaken by the time Halloween rolls around. I know that I should have already done a lot of things -- bought gifts, planned my decor, written things down. But instead, I have just rolled through the days, putting out fires as they pop up, hoping that I can still pull out a Christmas miracle. When my kids were young, I'd always warn them that Christmas was going to be really small this season. Somehow I don't remember that ever happening, even in the leanest of years. But the best one ever was when we were living in an old, beat-up camper on our land. We were completely immersed in working on our new house, and since apparently I don't multi-task well, I had not bought a thing and had no decorations up anywhere, except a 12-inch tiny tree that my Mama had given us. It was now Christmas Eve day and the Grinch was looming. I swung into a local gas station, where they had live (read: dead) trees still for sale. I negotiated the guy down to $5 for a decent-looking one. He strapped it to my roof and I headed off to Kmart, where I found paintball guns for the boys and a beautiful doll for our daughter. I scrounged around and found presents for immediate family and then hauled it all home. Ken and the boys dragged the tree into the house (which was dried-in, with a roof and not much else) and nailed it to the floor. We strung lights and a few ornaments on it and had the best Christmas ever. It's good for me to remember that year, when I'm already getting stressed in October. 

Meanwhile, back to the stuffed sausages laying all over the living room. This year, we ate and ate, rushing to and fro to get it all in. This was not a good thing, because we promptly got a stomach virus, starting on Christmas day. I'm sitting here now, wrung out with joints aching and cracking all over. That brief twilight moment after all the gifts were still fresh in our minds was overtaken with devilment and Montezuma's Revenge. The torn paper and ribbon, crumbs of every kind, and a basic dusting of sugar is covering all the important parts of the house. I guess I'll have to default to that old adage, "I'll think about it tomorra..."