Maybe next year...

I cannot wait for Christmas to be over. You're looking at the date of posting, perhaps, and thinking, but Mere, it was over when you wrote this. But it wasn't. We still have to do dinner tonight with Dad and girlfriend, and I treat gift-giving as a buy-as-you-must process, so I made the purchases a few hours ago and finished wrapping them a few minutes ago.

And even when that's over, the living room will still be strewn with ribbon and wrapping paper and receipts, even though I didn't even really buy that much, and also I'll still have to write thank-you notes. For things I didn't really need and cost people money they probably could have used for their electric bills and, I don't know, groceries.

What I don't understand is that in spite of the fact that this is roughly the way I experience Christmas every year, I still find myself looking forward to it, from somewhere in the first week of December until somewhere in the morning on the 25th. I'm wondering if maybe there's a way I could take that part, the looking forward, out. Clichéd though it will indeed sound, it's the expectation that gets me every time. If not for that misleading swell of excitement, brought on by, I suspect, the pine boughs and white lights, I imagine I might sail through this week with some degree of peace, tranquility, and even gratitude for just the fact of the days themselves and the fine people who continue inexplicably to be willing to populate my life. But that would probably require that I figure out how to move through the rest of the days that way, and heaven knows I haven't got that down yet, so perhaps I'm waxing ridiculous here. In any case, I just thought I'd take this opportunity to mention that I'm looking forward to when it's next week.