It's the most wonderful time of the year!

I’m so sad that the holiday season is so close to being over. While it’s been crazy and hectic and I have had quite a few experiences of frustration and desperation at the busy mall trying to get all of our shopping done, I thoroughly have enjoyed this last month. It’s the little stuff that I just love: chatting with co-workers about our holiday plans, random homemade treats in the office, 24-hour Christmas music on the local easy listening station, making plans with my dad to watch White Christmas, the holiday parties at work that we dread going to but where we always end up having a really nice time, driving around in the blistering cold looking for holiday-shaped pretzels and red and green sprinkles (ultimately hitting up 4 stores), and sorting through the usual junk mail and dreaded bills to find delightful cards and pictures from loved ones wishing us a happy holiday season. I can’t forget to give a shout out to the requisite “holiday sweater lady” in the office who, while during the rest of the year you find quite irritating, always makes you smile this time of year with her random office drop-ins sporting jingly reindeer earrings and bearing gifts of chocolate gold coins and red and green Hershey kisses. I so love that lady right now.

So it’s certainly bittersweet to look at the calendar and realize Christmas Eve is less than a week away. All of the craziness this month has lead up to this weekend, and it will be over so quickly! We say goodbye to paid holidays (after New Years) until Memorial Day, there will be no more Sears commercials advertising tools adorned with red velvet bows, no more fudge in the break room, no more Bing Crosby on the radio, and no more ladies with little Christmas trees on the folded down collars of their white turtle-necks (worn under their festive sweater-vests of course).

And I can’t find my Ally McBeal Christmas soundtrack CD! Actually, to be honest, I lost mine a few years ago, and then borrowed my aunt’s, which is the one I currently have frustratingly misplaced.

Do you know what else we have to look forward to once this holiday season wraps up? No, I’m not talking about the fact that we still have three months of this bitter cold winter to survive or that the suckiest let-down of a day, Valentines Day, is the closest thing to a holiday we have to look forward to; I’m talking about that other unfortunate realization that will come in January when the Visa bill arrives in the mail. Yup, holiday-fueled credit card debt, I’m totally looking forward to that happy day of realization.