Not generous enough and you can be called a scrooge, but succumb to the subtle cues from all your service personnel - and you’ll single-handedly pressure the Feds into raising the Fed Funds rate!
Not merry enough and you’ll be diagnosed as suffering from SAD, too merry and you might convince the cops you’re DUI!
But the most conflicting of all holiday time chores is the DECORATIONS!
First there’s the timing of it.
It’s not even Black Friday after Thanksgiving and the neighbors have wheeled in their scarecrows, rushed back and torn down their cotton cobwebs off their trees, unpeeled all the decals of various ghouls off their twenty-two window panes, baked a couple of pumpkin pies off of their jack o’lanterns and in the darkness of the early November sundown replaced all that with three giant motorized and lighted reindeer galloping eternally skyward, a shimmering lace of lighted snowflake trimming hanging on their eaves, a lighted candle and wreath on each of their twenty-two window panes, a gleaming red sateen bow and wreath in front of their eight-cylinder Chevy Suburban, and both lyrics and aroma of chestnuts roasting on an open fire wafting off their hearth, warming the cockles of my heart - except NOT! I’m still struggling with the dishes from Thanksgiving Day - breakfast, that is! (Dinner was with kind friends who had invited us over!)
We just can’t catch up and so have resorted to an elaborate formula to calculate exactly when to start Christmas decorations: in years that Christmas falls on Wednesday or later - start decorating the weekend before, else two weekends before, unless snow, wind, rain, any other foul weather, work, housework, children’s homework, children’s EC activities, friends, or a Winter box-office opener gets in the way, in which case wait till the weekend before.
And that’s only the ‘when’ part of it! the ‘how’ of it is another story entirely! Promise you another post on that!
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