…you keep a few extra Christmas cards ready to mail out, because you got one from somebody you didn’t send one to!
Now it’s your turn!
Your neighbor, who happens to be the bat-shit insane Krazy Kat Lady of the Lane sobs on your shoulder this morning about her shitty life and she has No Where To Go For Christmas! And she’s Jewish, BTW. And gluten-intolerant. And vegetarian. And you invite her over for Christmas anyway. Even though I already have over 20 people coming for Christmas.
Egads, I need a gallon of Scotch and a sippy cup. STAT!
I used to keep emergency gifts in the car just in case I got one from someone I didn’t expect to. I did that for years and years.
… you realize that you have inadvertently entered the Ring of Death* after it is too late to turn back.
*otherwise known as the Mall Ring Road the rest of the year. Seriously, how is it that every year I promise myself that I’m not going within 10 blocks of the mall during Christmas season, yet every year, I will end up staring numbly at hundreds of tail-lights creeping sloooowly up County Line Road, remembering “oh yeah I wasn’t supposed to come this way”. :smack:
…people who’ve never been in the presence of snow a single day in their life spray white foam in their window. Because, well, uh, it’s “the season.” (The season for what I don’t know.)
At least until Dec. 26th, when they scrape it off.
The TV is all reruns and Netflix sends me some really bad stuff that I queued on a whim and didn’t really want in the first place.
For the first time, I got to take a little one shopping for a present for Her Mommy. (I’m her nanny, she’s four.) Thus completing the circle, because my dad used to do that with me. I have a son, but his daddy wasn’t around, so I never got to do it til now.
Oh, was I supposed to gripe?
Talk turns to whether or not we’re going to have a scorcher on Christmas Day.
It’s the time of the year when it’s suddenly bloody cold, and you remember that it will stay cold for the next few months too.
On the plus side: fireworks, booze and cheesy pop songs.
It’s the time of year when everyone’s trying to buy presents for other people, but all the TV is talking about is buying presents for yourself. And how badly other people’s presents suck.
Yeah, the other 11 months of the year I find it convenient that my workplace is very close to a mall. But Friday evening, with a malfunctioning traffic light adding to the chaos, I nearly didn’t make it out of there.
I check off the items I need on my Winter Emergency Survival Supplies list. Food. T.P. Coffee and tea. Cat food and litter. Ibuprofen and toothpaste. Snow-Melt for the front steps. Beer and/or wine. Stamps. Because even though I’ve never been snowed in for more than a day and I don’t live far from a store, it’s a pain to have to get bundled up and drive in crappy weather for just one or two stupid things we need right NOW.
It’s time to stop worrying about gifts that it’s too late to buy and send.
It’s time to throw out the bizarre food products we got last year for Christmas. Yes, the cherry habañero salsa, the macadamia nut tire patch kit, the strange petit fours we ate 5 of, and the pomegranate-and-key-lime flavored popcorn all have to go. No, you can’t put that weird popcorn out for the birds. You know they won’t eat it either.
It’s time to try to find the Yaktrax in the bottom of the coat closet.
It’s time to realize you missed the opportunity to buy a snow-blower for half price on e-Bay. :smack:
You wear a jacket to work in the morning and forget to take it home because by then it’s 75 out. So you accumulate jackets at work until you run out of jackets and you have to freeze for a morning or two, then you remember to take them all home and start all over again.
Every single old person and their grandmother is out on the streets, going 25 in a 40, in the left lane, with their fucking blinker on, in front of me, wherever I go.