Step 1: Move into a new house in a new city less than a month before Christmas. Unpack as much as you can and then stuff everything else into the basement and the spare bedroom upstairs. Pray no one needs to get in there.
Step 2: Agree to host Christmas for most of your family because you’re the house that makes the most sense this year.
Step 3: Start a new job the week before Christmas, making it tough to get all those last-minute errands done.
Step 4: Forego your usual practice of making many, many lists and figure it will all work out.
Step 5: Make one exception to Step 4 and hastily make a grocery list the morning of the 23rd before you go to work. That way your husband can do the shopping and you’ll still have time to pick up all the things you forgot.
Step 6: Hide stocking stuffers and gifts in various places around your new house. Having to look for them at 9:00 on Christmas Eve so you can finish wrapping will provide a different sort of orientation to the house you’ve only lived in for 3 weeks.
Step 7: Start cooking on Christmas Eve morning by just doing things as the thought occurs to you. Send someone down the street to the grocery store for the items you forgot in your half-awake list-making state.
Step 7 1/2: Thank your lucky stars Santa’s helpers are there to pitch in.
Step 8: Realize you forgot some of the presents you meant to get, are short on some critical elements of Christmas Dinner (pickles) and neglected to appropriately plan for the vegetables you wanted to serve.
Step 9: Decide that this is the “wing it” Christmas and none of the above issues matter. This philosophy will be reinforced when your three-year-old opens his stocking on Christmas morning with a face lit up with joy and says, “He came! Santa knows me!”
Step 10: Have a very merry chaotic Christmas with great family and the best damn turkey ever cooked in a brand-new-to-us oven. (And we didn’t set fire to the turkey like we did the first year in our old house!)
I hope your holiday was great and you’re getting a little down time before January comes and things ramp up again.
[Pictures #2 and 5 credited to my sister, the other iPhone addict.]
