Christmas Olympics

There is part of you that wants it all just to go away. The sheer amount of work and money to put on the Christmas holiday is nothing short of titanic. You don't want to even add up the costs and the only thing you know about the work is that there simply is not enough time to get it all in. Getting the tree and decorating are just the starting gun for the Christmas Olympics that starts Thanksgiving weekend and doesn't officially end until the New Year. And like Chevy Chase at the end of National Lampoons Christmas movie, all you can mutter at  the end is, I did it.

And yes kids up the work load. There are the mountain of presents that have to be bought. And these are not cheap gifts. You are talking high tech presents with hefty price tags. IPODS, phones, notebooks, IPADS, laptops, speakers, televisions, plasmas. Yeah ok. This might be a little over the top but not much. Throw in the XBOX's and video games and GPS and the Kindle Fire and you might as well file for bankruptcy now. Underwear and sweaters have been replaced by 4G Smart phones. The low tech Christmas simply doesn't exist anymore.

And then you have the activities. Seeing Santa. Seeing the lights. The windows, the stores, going to the parties, throwing the parties, entertaining extended family and not so extended family. Talking to the friend brought by the friend who ends up at your kitchen table because he or shes parents are in Aruba. The long lost relative who drops in and then disappears for another ten years.

But really it is time that is in shortest supply. That the money runs out is a given. What you don't have enough of is time to get it all in so the Xmas cards take a hit with seeing A Christmas Carol or going caroling or making cookies or putting up those extra lights on that one pine tree that you always said you would decorate stupidly five years ago.

Because then it just ends and you are taking down the tree and stowing the boxes and facing the long slog toward spring with a few memories and fewer dollars, as the countdown begins to the next Christmas Olympics.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

That Holiday Hangover

It has nothing to do with alcohol, but that could be part of it. It would be easy to ascribe the fuzziness, wooziness, utter exhaustion of the holiday hangover to making merry a bit much and once the alcohol filters out then the world would return to it's everyday equilibrium. But this hangover is a combination of money spent, days lost, family insulted, visibility lost, vocations nonexistent, while dancing with the ghost of Christmas past present and future. Because it is during the very holidays we celebrate our childhood that we glimmer mortality from drinking and eating horribly for weeks.

So it is part food coma as we trudge back to some semblance of reality and it really is a good thing we only see our relatives once a year lest we shoot them dead. What is is about siblings that become so horribly dysfunctional one can scarcely believe you occupied the same house for all those years? And parents lord in as part parent, friend, confidant, boss, irritant, until you just want to run back to your job or your office or your bedroom and repeat, I have grown up, I have grown I have grown up.

And while this rolls on you are Christmas in a very real sense and it is for the children beats in your head as you stay up until four AM and then stagger out a bleary eyed Santa ready to put it all on for the children who see only the glory of the season. And so you suck it up, drink some more coffee, inhale some more bad coffee cake and plow through the day before heading to the relatives. And isn't it amazing that Uncle Dick is still unemployed after twenty four years? And how long is Jennifer going to hang out in Hollywood as a waitress? And how did your brother marry such an idiot? Doesn't your sister see her husbands been screwing around on her for ten years!

But all this is swept under as you exchange gifts and drink champagne and Baileys and Vodka and beer and eat all the salty ham your poor blood pressure could ever manage and all the dry bland turkey you could ever stuff into your mouth and then the sweets the sweets the sweets! Is chocolate poisoning possible? You wonder as you sit straight up a three AM with your heart beating like a tom tom. Never never again you swear. I will never eat again! I will never drink again! I will never have my sister and brothers kids over to dismantle my house again and throw my cellphone into a cup of Diet Coke!

And so you emerge for a few days. Struggle to work with little sleep and all sorts of chemicals doing all sorts of things to your brain. You pass other fellow eye-creased revelers stumbling through their routines. And then, just about the time your colon adjusts, your credit card barks that it is still alive, and you begin to get your feet on the ground, it's time for....NEW YEARS!

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January