12 22 03

Where
did this year go?

I’m still
stuck in September and here it is Christmas, unbelievable
isn’t it?

Somehow,
every year at this time I manage to get myself snarled in a
grumpy pit and don’t seem to be able to extract myself until
early January. It isn’t something I’m proud of and have tried
for years to change.

I’m pleased
to tell you that I finally did it this year. Here it is the
week before Christmas. I’ve managed to get all of my cards out
and mailed. Wrote something on each one of them. I helped put
the tree up the other weekend and glory or glories; I had a
good time shopping.

You’d think I
would have figured out what makes me so squirrelly when it
comes to shopping but until this year I didn’t have a clue.
Annual mall panic attacks have always been routine for me. The
agony of driving to a mall, looking for things and then buying
stuff just scared the fool out of me. It’s very hard to
describe. I have always looked around and envied those people
I saw who appeared to be having a good time shopping.

Were they on
drugs? Were they mad? What they drunk? They didn’t appear to
have anything wrong with them. Looked fairly normal to me, or
at least as normal as can be expected for this time of the
year.

How could you
manage to be inside of a modern mall or store with thousands
of other people looking over gifts, which are on sale and
acting like you are having a good time? It was a mystery to
me. I have seen people taking their time and actually
laughing. 

Yes,
laughing…out loud. Doing this while sipping on a cup of coffee
or having an ice cream and holding more bags than you can
imagine.

What was
their secret? I was always tempted to stop and ask, but
figured someone would turn me in and I’d get arrested for
being stupid. Trust me this is a true story. This has been
going on all of my life, except when I was small boy and
bought everything in a hardware store down the street from
where we lived.

What I did
this year was probably simple for most of you, and you’ve
probably been doing it for years, but I guess I was absent the
day they told us how to do this in school.

Or I just
wasn’t paying attention.

What did I do
this time that was so different and radical?

Just what
Santa does…I made a list and checked it twice. Am I dumb or
what?

Normally
that’s me dashing into the stores a few days before Christmas
without a clue as to what I might want for our family members
and buying stuff no one wants or can use. The stress and
anxiety is enough to put any sane person into a coma, trust
me, been there, done that.

Nope, when
someone who is as organized as I am, performs an unorganized
action, it goes against every fiber in his or her bodies. My
mind says go, go, go…. but my heart says no, no, no. This
isn’t going to work. You can’t do this.

This year, I
started saving the catalogs as they came out in November and
circling items I thought might work for my family. I even
circled backups in case the stores were sold out of something.
I actually put some deep thought into whether someone might
like one gift over another.

Then I hit
the stores and in the space of about one hour, I had
everything I needed. I was able to get in, get out and was
proud of myself for staying in a good mood the whole time. I
even chatted with the sales people and wasn’t impatient when
it came time to checkout at the register. Then all I had to do
was wrap all of this stuff. That’s almost as easy, start a
fire, get something to eat, locate the Elvis Christmas albums
and cut, tape and you’re done in no time at all.

My family
thinks I’m bonkers and is wondering what has happened to me.
They won’t accept my explanation that I’m just a slow learner.

The other
thing I’ve come to grips with is that unless you owe money to
someone, there isn’t much use in continuing to work is there?

So, this year
I adopted the attitude that perhaps charging some of the
things I bought isn’t really all that bad since it obligates
me to stick around and live long enough to pay everything off.

Which
according to my calculations should be about November of next
year.