The Holidays Are Coming!

It's here, isn't it? That busy, social stretch of time that extroverts love and introverts get all anxious about. Shopping in crowded stores that are blaring Christmas music and assaulting me with cinnamon smells, flashing lights, little sleigh bells that jingle on every door. Planning family gatherings with divorced and remarried parents, which means four different get-togethers with various factions of the family in a good year. Endless planning and cleaning and cooking and shopping. It's not that I don't love the holidays: decorating the tree with my girls, laughing and catching up with family, watching my girls' faces light up when they open their gifts. It's that I don't love everything else about the holidays. The gear-up, the pressure, the shopping, the clean-up pre- and post-gathering, the un-decorating, the friends with their timely hand-written Christmas cards and home-made sugar cookies from scratch that make me feel like I never got the proper domestic gene.

For me this busy time of year starts in early October, when we haven't even fully settled into the school routine yet, and I suddenly need to plan my daughter's birthday party. Then comes Halloween. Thanksgiving. Christmas. My other daughter's birthday. Valentine's Day (which is a stress-free holiday unless you have school kids who need to do 30+ valentines each). And then, finally, I get to breathe a sigh of relief and focus on non-holiday things for a stretch.

So, by this time of year, when the Thanksgiving "what dishes will you bring?" emails are going around and the stores are already celebrating Christmas, I'm already tired.

But I'm happy to say that this year, it's different. While the holidays and family time matter, they aren't the center of my days this time around. This year, my days are spent writing first, and planning and shopping second. And not the kind of writing I was doing last year at this time, the "I sure hope someday somebody takes a chance on me" writing that I had been doing for years. This year it's all happened. Someone did take a chance on me. In the past 12 months I've gotten a literary agent, revised The Art of Adapting word for word with his excellent guidance, dug deep and dumped my fears and found out what I really have inside me. I'm proud of the novel I ended up with. The Art of Adapting is the best thing I've written. And then came the book deal. Getting a publishing contract has been a dream of mine for as long as I can remember. The kind of dream that's so big and so unlikely that you never think about what happens after it comes true. This holiday season, my days are filled with discovering what happens next.

And what happens next is this: looking over copyedits of my novel for my publisher, going back and forth with them as we try to find the perfect cover design, and writing my next novel. I pulled off the birthday party, Halloween was great, Thanksgiving's just about all planned out, I've even started some Christmas shopping. And my anxiety about the whole thing is practically nil, because every morning I wake up not thinking about all of the holiday tasks I need to complete, but how I need to trim that lengthy backstory passage, or work in a hint at a character's secret through dialogue, or find the best words to describe the scent of a summer morning.

The holidays are still barreling straight for me, like they always do. My kids are right this second sitting on the couch with notepads on their knees making epic wish lists for Christmas. I'm shut inside my office, trying to drown out the Disney Channel, writing. I will not be sending out Christmas cards. I won't be making sugar cookies. I will be writing, putting the finishing touches on my second novel, proofing the layout of The Art of Adapting, settling on the right cover design, continuing the outline for my third novel. And wishing all of you the best kind of holiday season. One where your days are spent doing what you love most, visiting with the people you love most, and where the stress of all that you "should" do to prepare and celebrate gets forgotten. Happy holidays!

The Perfect Gift

Apparently, Santa got it right this year. String Bean has been asking for a new bike for a while, and not just any bike, but a princess one, purple, if at all possible. When she woke up on Christmas Day, and sleepily dragged herself out into my mom’s living room, and there it was, in all of its perfect purple splendor, with a matching purple princess helmet, she just wanted to snuggle with me and avoid looking at it until Peanut woke up, too. At first we were worried that she’d changed her mind sometime in the past week and no longer wanted it, but once Peanut joined her in the living room, where Peanut found not only the scooter she’d been ogling in one of the toy catalogs that had come in the mail, but a hula hoop, which she’s been asking for nonstop for several months (how she even knows what a hula hoop is, I’ve never figured out), then the excitement finally hit. The girls donned their princess helmets, jumped on the bike and scooter, and took off. Well, not really, because we were inside, and my mom’s house is on six unpaved acres at the end of a long dirt road, and there wasn’t anywhere flat or paved around. So, they made do with doing a tight circuit around the kitchen.

Later, we took them out to a nice long, paved bike path that cuts through some beautiful woods, and has no cars or non-walking, non-biking traffic of any kind. Peanut decided that what she wanted was to stand on the scooter with both feet, while me, hubby, and my mother took turns pulling her along. But once String Bean hit the pavement, she was booking right along. She figured out the brakes, steering, and how to climb a hill within minutes. In the end, we had to quit, not because String Bean was tired from her long bike ride, but because we were all tired from dragging Peanut and the princess scooter around behind her.

After naps (and she took her first long nap in a long time that afternoon, another great benefit of the biking outing), String Bean immediately hopped onto her bike and started doing laps around the kitchen again. She then figured out that if she pedaled hard enough, she could ride on the carpet, so she started doing laps around the dining room table. When bed time rolled around, and I told String Bean it was time to head into her room for her nightly story, she looked at me and said, “Instead of a story tonight, I think I’d rather ride my bike around the kitchen some more.” So, with all of the many wonderful gifts from grandparents and aunts and friends that the girls have been enjoying, it’s nice to know that Santa was still able to bring the biggest winner of all.

Merry Christmas

In my family, we always have our big family gathering and gift-opening session on Christmas Eve. I’ve never gotten a clear answer for why this is, beyond a vague reference to German ancestors who must be to blame. We still had the Santa gifts to open and stockings to wake up to on Christmas Day, so in a way it was the best of both worlds. We had a big get-together and a big meal and lots of new stuff to play with Christmas Eve, and when we woke up, we got a bunch more stuff to open and even more toys to play with. I’m keeping up the tradition with my girls, who will no doubt one day ask where it came from, so that I can give them the same ambiguous answer about someone somewhere generations before deciding that it should be done this way.

In our modern new family, we not only have the Christmas Eve/Day celebrations (usually at my mother’s house, followed by a sledding trip up the mountain from her house), but we also have the early Christmas with the in-laws, the informal pre-Christmas gathering with my step-siblings, and the post-Christmas brunch gathering with my father and step-mother. In all, this amounts to five Christmas gatherings/gift opening sessions for the kids. At several of these get-togethers, we’ve banned gifts for all but the kids, because it was just getting too hard to prep for otherwise. So, in light of all of these family holiday get-togethers and new toy/clothes binges, it may take several years for the girls to catch on that not everyone exchanges the bulk of their gifts on Christmas Eve. And that not everyone has five Christmas celebrations each year.

Whatever your traditions are, and however many days they span, I hope you have a very happy holiday season.

Christmas Crunch

I stopped by the Halloween store in the early afternoon on Halloween to get a last-minute costume for hubby, only to find the whole store gutted already, with the few remaining costumes in a messy heap in the center of the warehouse-sized room. So I ran next door to Target, which had a huge section dedicated to Halloween merchandise, only to find the Halloween items had been moved to a messy pile on one shelf, and the rest of the section had been stocked with Christmas items. Strangest of all, there were several people in the new Christmas section, loading their carts as if they were quickly running out of time to get their decorations purchased. Halloween wasn’t even over, and the Christmas frenzy was already starting? As much as I enjoy Christmas, I’d prefer to just celebrate one holiday at a time. And even though Thanksgiving is one of my least favorite holidays, not just because I’m a vegetarian and it centers around consuming a dead bird, but the whole glut of food aspect of the day just never made sense to me, I’d still like to have Thanksgiving behind me before getting into the Christmas spirit.