Christmas Cheer

Mid-December, today.

Honesty compels me to admit that I probably won’t be writing much until after Christmas now. That’s probably okay. I participated in NaNoWriMo this year to push myself on my word count, and it was pretty productive – not only in terms of word count, but also in creative ideas generated. I would say I have some plot threads to work with now that I likely wouldn’t have thought of if I’d been writing the whole book ‘slow and steady’. And I’m about halfway through my target word-count. I’m probably still securely on track to finish this novel by spring, so long as I do pick things back up in January.

I am nearly done my Christmas preparations. I’m certain that I will still be up until 3am Christmas morning wrapping and finishing things. That’s how I roll.

I am immensely, immensely excited for Christmas this year. I kind of get that way every year, but it feels more giddy this year. Maybe it’s because I’ve just been buying instead of making presents. I love making presents because I love spending a bit of extra time fussing at a thing and turning it into a meditation on how much I love the person I’m crafting for. But it also means that I spend the build-up to Christmas scrambling to assemble scattered to-do lists because no project ever goes start-to-finish. You get it mostly finished and then you need to purchase another piece for it. Or it’s almost there, but probably presentable and you’re short on time so it’s best to move on and come back if there’s time. Handcrafting things is lovely, but it does mean that when you’re not working at something, you may be stressing more about the phenomenal list of things yet to be done.

This fall I’ve been so dead exhausted all the time that I decided I better not even push for hand-crafted things.  Instead I’ll just buy presents and wrap them like normal people do. And I’m so glad I decided that. The exhaustion seems to keep getting worse and lately it seems that I I could go to bed at 7:00 every night and be happily out. And then probably still wake up like a zombie in the morning. How will I get through the rest of December?

Apropos of this suffocating quilt of exhaustion, I have to remember to go for blood tests tomorrow after I drop the kids off at school, when I almost certainly would prefer to return home and chill by the fire with some eggnog and a project. It is a thing that has me a tiny bit stressed because I have surmised what my doctor is checking for, and, of course, it is a Serious Thing. I know the tests will show it is not that serious thing, and instead it will turn out to just be more thyroid weirdness and not anything serious at all. But that only makes it more annoying to have to spend time on going for tests, and time on worrying-but-not-worrying.

Luckily it should all be sorted by the weekend, at which point all the kids and Ian are on Christmas holidays and I’ll be able to put my whole focus on the Christmas Cheer. If the exhaustion lets up, I may even have some presents wrapped by then.