03 December 2014

My Grinch-y Heart

grinch heart photo: Grinch Heart Grow grinch_growing_heart.gif
Right now I'm here...

I'm in kind of a funk about the month of December. I don't know if it's because Thanksgiving was so late this year, but I just feel like Christmas is going to be here and gone before I've had time to properly enjoy it! I think some of this stems from how I feel about Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. There's the food, of course, but it's really one of the only holidays we have that I feel like has very few cultural pressures. It's not religious, there are no gifts involved, it doesn't revolve around showing appropriate amounts of patriotism...it's just meant to be a time to gather and eat and just be. But anymore it feels like Thanksgiving is just supposed to be a prelude to Christmas. It's like the Christmas season starts the day after Halloween now and that just makes me grumpy. I see all of these people on social media who have put up their trees and Christmas lights by the end of the first week of November, quickly followed by a mid-November onslaught of bloggers posting gift guides. I start to feel stressed that now I'm somehow "behind" on Christmas, as though it's some sort of race.

On top of all of this is the fact that we will be travelling 2 out of the 3 weekends in December before Christmas. One of those weekends is to celebrate Christmas with M's family and another one of the weekends is going to NYC (more on that later). So it's not as though we're going to be out of town not doing fun, Christmas-y things. It's just that I realized when we got home from Thanksgiving that this weekend is pretty much my one shot at decorating the house and doing another marathon cookie baking session like I did last year.

M and I typically just exchange stockings, but our trip to NYC is our gift to each other this year. We celebrated Christmas with my family the night before Thanksgiving (complete with Christmas tree and falling snow!) and most of the gifts we're giving M's family are quite small in size, so there won't be any pretty wrapped gifts under the tree.

I'm also feeling a bit gloomy about the fact our holiday time with my family has already come and passed. We absolutely LOVE living in Vermont, but man, it's hard to be so far away from our families. We have our trip to Baltimore to look forward to seeing more of M's family (can't wait to get my hands on my little niece and nephew again!), but I don't know when I'll see my parents and sister again, which makes me incredibly sad, especially at this time of year.

Also we do not have a cute picture for our Christmas cards, which means I haven't ordered our cards yet, which is causing me an embarrassing amount of stress.

So yeah...feeling kind of blah in general. I'm hoping a weekend of cookie baking and wreath making and tree decorating will bring me to this:

1 comments:

MCW said...

The late Thanksgiving is throwing me off too. I feel like there is no time to really enjoy the season because it's so busy. It would be hard to be so far from family...hope you become less Grinchy :)