Winning At Advent

Ok ok. I get it, it’s Advent. I know it’s been Advent for several days. There’s no need to look at me like that.

Its just that it almost doesn’t seem worth it to take the wretched candles all the way out of the box for a mear-smear three short weeks. Because that’s what it is this year. Three weeks of advent.

Did you know that Christmas is on a Monday this year? Which means that the last Sunday of Advent is also Christmas Eve. And this might surprise you, but a lot of people by that point are not going to be thinking about Advent any more. Indeed, lots of them, cough, aren’t even thinking about it Now.

Mercifully though, St. Nicholas did manage come on time. I’ve been believing for a long while that he should bring Asterix into the lives of my children. I didn’t know if he could because I’ve neglected to teach my children to speak French, because I’m a failure, in case you were wondering. But then I discovered that a friend has let her children have the books in English. And so even though this is a great cop out, a devastating admission of my own defeat, I prayed and asked St. Nicholas to bring Asterix to us all, and he did. Because that’s how it works. You just pray, and whoever you pray to gives you whatever you want. It’s like magic.

I mean, it may be that St. Nicholas was bashing around in Kenya for a week, and there were some shiny Asterix books in English in a shop, and so he picked them up before rushing back onto the plane, but its not really important how he got them. The thing is that they are here now and already I can’t get anyone to do anything, like eat breakfast, because of how engrossed they all are.

The problem this year is that I’ve mentally embraced some kind of pseudo-sabbath rest, essentially checking out and moving into a coffee shop, or a spa, or a tropical island in my head–all the lights are on, but I’m in the Seychelles eating bonbons on a beach. It’s a little awkward for me to descend into perfect peace in the middle of the busiest time of the year. It would have been better for this to happen to me when, say, I actually had a month of vacation stretching before me.

So what I’m doing now is walking around apologizing to people for not remembering to do any of the things I said I was going to do. It’s vaguely humiliating. But not so much so that I’ve been able to haul myself out of my haze and reengage with the reason for the season–that would be stress, in case you were thinking it was something else.

Probably the day after Christmas, when I really could crash into a glow of relaxing chocolate, I will wake up and pull out my list and start harassing myself again. That’s the way it is.

So anyway, I’m going to stop this and wander downstairs to examine all the gold coins and see if they are really chocolate or if they’re something else. And then I’ll wander up to the attic and stare at the children while they do school. And then I’ll wander downstairs and stare out of the kitchen window. It’s so much winning, even I might get tired of all the winning.