Tradition

 

Is anyone else having a hard time adjusting to writing an 11 in the month column instead of a 10? No…just me? Okay glad we’ve cleared that up. I just cannot wrap my little head around the fact that it indeed is November….I am in the pre-plan stall pattern. You know the shaky, palpitation-inducing state where you can foresee having a ton of things to do but you don’t have the organizational prowess to plan yet. Like I know I should go ahead and start putting together any homemade Christmas decorations I want to add this year (I’m looking at you J-O-Y covered in garland) and I know I should go ahead and order my Christmas cards so as to avoid the normal stressed-rushed feeling I have….but I just cant. Its so hard for me to plan for the next holiday before the first one has happened. Does anyone else feel that way? I blame it on the fact that I am now an adult and have lost the childhood Christmas magic.

Growing up, the thing that ALWAYS signaled to me that I need to start celebrating Christmas was the arrival of the JCPenney Christmas catalog. As a child I DEVOURED this big book of Christmas gift goodness and became quite enraged if I thought that someone else had gotten to dog-ear the pages before I did. I attacked this book with strategy of course. First, I would peruse through the Girls Size 6x-12 section, making a mental note of the latest Christmas fashions that I “needed”. Then, I skipped over the boring boy section and the Men’s wear with the zeal of someone flipping the pages of a dictionary to where I determined began the true joy of my heart…the TOY SECTION! I would literally spend HOURS perusing EVERY, SINGLE TOY on the page….reading the DESCRIPTIONS MIND YOU, and coming up with a plan to convince Santa that I really did NEED the Scoopy Sno-Cone Maker this year…or the gem miner….or the Microscope…and maybe the Christmas Barbie and a Cabbage Patch doll and some updated play-kitchen food…and well you get the idea. Basically, from an early age I have been a marketing representative’s dream client. I TOTALLY buy into the hype!

So it filled my heart with new-found joy last night when I came home from work to find that John Brooks has officially caught the bug. He was sitting on the floor, with the Toys R Us big toy book spread wide open, carefully perusing the available items for the year.

Queue the holiday music!