I was so excited to type the text above that I had spacing issues. But I’m sure you can understand because who doesn’t get all wibbly when they get their text alert from the North Pole that the Christmas List deadline is fast approaching?!

This year has been particularly hard.

Ya. I know. I can feel your empathy coming through the wi-fi airwaves.

Thanks for that.

I mean, how much willpower can one woman be expected to have.

Avoiding the red and green Hershey’s Kisses at the super market…

Knowing the Christmas cards are sitting in their box, on the floor of my closet, just waiting for a cheery holiday note and flourish of a golden or silvery marker…

Wondering if that faint, jingle-y sound that I hear when the house is particularly quiet is a real signal from all my boxes in the basement – to come get them, and free all the characters and creatures and festiviosities from their year-long rubbermaid prison sentences) – or, as the Nearly Perfect Husband says, it is my restrained and frustrated mind playing tricks on me, because I know Decorating Day is a mere four days away.

Oh ya!

Christmas Counting is in full force now.

Can’t count today (Sunday) because I’m already in it. So that leaves…. Monday (one) Tuesday (two), Wednesday (three), Thursday (four!)… and I can’t count Friday because that is Decorating Day. Oh my…

I have to excuse myself to go check my blood pressure, because I am sure it is skyrocketing, having just typed that out loud and seen it for myself…

It’s cool. I’m okay.

I can make it.

I am now eleven quick-y meals and one nearly-all-day-long turkey-laden dinner (with requisite leftovers) away from springing my basement-dwelling Christmas awesomeness (who are probably continuing their Shawshank Redemption style escape planning, and one year I will have to pick them up in Mexico)… anyway, I will be liberating them all from their containers so they can clean and shine and primp themselves up for their month-long display topside.

And it’s all just four days… which is like 1440 minutes.

But we can’t count this minute because we are already in it… and we can’t count the last-minute because…

Wait!

Did I just hear jingle bells, coming from the basement?

Thanks for readin’.

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