Christmas Up the Fridge

Thanksgiving is over. The out-of-town visitors have returned home. Most of the leftovers have been eaten. The carnival of bedlam that is Black Friday has come and gone. The oldies radio station in the Cities (which now mainly plays the music I listened to while growing up, and let me tell you sometime about what an existential kick in the mouth that is) has made its annual switch over to perpetual Christmas music.

I used to love Christmas. For a kid like me with an overactive imagination and energy to spare, it was all too easy to get caught up in the season. My sisters and I went to a parochial elementary school, so the holiday became completely integrated with everything about our school lives for an entire month. Waiting for the TV specials to air, and watching when they did because it only happened once each year, was an event. Decorating the tree and the house were cherished family traditions. The handful of Christmas albums in my parents' somewhat minimal record collection were favorites, just because they seemed to resonate a bit differently. It was always exciting to come home for winter break during college, knowing how much family and cousin time there would be. Even the one piece of writing I did of any note, before the past few years, was seeing a play I wrote produced by a community theater group. It was about a little boy who wanted to stay up late on Christmas Eve to ask Santa Claus to help him find his missing dog.

But things happened as I got older, and now, to put it simply, I find Christmas to be one of the most depressing times of the year. I'll spare you the details about why, but all too frequently I find myself wandering through the season feeling much like Charlie Brown in his beloved TV special. He sees everyone around him so involved and happy and full of cheer, and is left slightly perplexed about why he can't allow myself to see it all the same way. (If you know the special, you also know Charlie Brown tends to overthink his way through the story. It's no secret this is an issue of mine as well.)

Luckily though, I've learned in adulthood to try and be proactive about such problems. The way I see it, if you know some kind of emotional obstacle is just on your horizon, why not find ways to circumvent it before it becomes overwhelming? Which brings us to this year, the Christmas season of 2015.

I know myself well enough to realize I'm much happier when I'm working toward a goal. This past summer I had some success with that by covering my refrigerator door with a collection of sticky notes, each one listing either a task there'd be time to accomplish during the summer or some kind of small adventure I could have. I didn't get every item on this massive To-Do list completed, but I finished enough of it to make my summer into something it otherwise would not have been. In the spirit of proactivity, I've decided to bring that idea back for Christmas. I've come to think of the holiday season as the stretch of time between the first day back to school after Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, which essentially means the month of December, give or take a few days. I don't plan on going with the sticky notes like in the summer, but instead, for a more seasonal touch, I bought a set of note-sized gift tags, like these:

The problem now is trying to think of what to include that will help squeeze some joy out of a time when I tend to lean the other way. There are some traditions to list and look forward to, but they might not be enough to chase off holiday blues, or even help push me toward my goal. So today, just as the holiday season is about to start, I'm putting out the call for any ideas or recommendations people might have about things to include on the December gift tag Fridge List. What are things you enjoy? What traditions do you have? What might you suggest to nudge me out of the funk I know is coming, but won't necessarily overly-stress me in the process? If you're someone in my daily life, what are some things we could do together? These don't even have to be holiday-specific ideas, but things that could be done this time of year, especially with winter break coming up in a few weeks. 

So...any ideas? 

I am Thankful for YOU Because....

A couple of years ago I lazied my way out of sending Christmas cards (possibly forever, with a handful of notable exceptions). My plan that year instead was to make a list of the brief messages I would have sent people and put them all together as part of a holiday blog post, that you could read by clicking here if you were so inclined. The kicker to this was that instead of identifying which message was intended for what person, I left it all anonymous and open to wide and frustrating speculation, and was surprised to find out how many people were left curious. So, why not do a different version of that same thing?

A newer tradition at the school where I work started up last year. A pile of blank notes is kept in the staff workroom in the days leading up to the Thanksgiving break. People are encouraged to take as many of these notes as they'd like, then write a short message about why they are thankful for someone else on our staff, and then put that note in their mailbox, either signed or left anonymously. I did a few of them last year (mostly to defy expectations) and may have even received one or two myself.

Instead of passing along those notes this year though, I'm going to put my messages to my colleagues right here for the whole wide Internet to read. However, once again, I'm going to make them all anonymous. Maybe this will leave some people in the dark, but, like I said the last time I did this, I'd like to think the people who these are written for would recognize which are directed toward them. Some of these people might not ever see this post for any number of reasons, but some will. I work with a good number of quality people, several of whom have become good friends I'm grateful to have in my life. If circumstances ever present a path that would see me following a way out of education, one of the things I would truly miss about it would be these people and the sense of community they provide for me. Tonight, on the weekend before my favorite week of the calendar year, I'm going to provide some examples of why they are so important in my world, and why I'm thankful for each of them.

(And no, I am never going to solidly confirm any names regarding who these are meant for. So don't bother asking. I'm totally not kidding on this. Guess away if you must, but it just ain't gonna happen.)

Here we go....

*I have a history with you that is unique between us compared to me and anyone else in the building. I'm thankful I get to see you the semi-regular times I do, and that after what's become a fair amount of time we're still able speak in our own version of verbal shorthand.

*It's been a rare thing for me to have someone like you in a school I can talk to with such shared language. I'm thankful that element is a part of so many of my days.

*I don't know if you always get the proper credit for the amount of work you do in keeping the whole school community moving forward. More than that, I'm thankful for having someone as kind as you in my life.

*I'm thankful to witness the energy and ambition you bring to your job, as well as giving me opportunities to justify to myself that some of the decisions I'm making are the right ones.

*I'm thankful I have you for my sounding board on just about any subject I'd need one for.

*Some people change the tone of the world around them by simply being themselves. I'm thankful I get to experience a piece of that from you.

*I'm thankful I've had you around as long as I've had to help me figure out what I'm doing, encourage me in the times I'm doing something right, and call me out on my BS when I need it.

*I'm thankful for the way you won't hold back when you feel passionately about something, and for knowing I never have to hold back with you.

*I still don't fully understand why you did it, but I'm thankful that instead of trying to delicately tiptoe around the walls I've been known to put up around myself, you decided to simply bulldoze your way over them.

*I'm thankful for knowing that you are, more often than not, a part of each day for me, and because I know I could sit and frequently have the kinds of conversations with you that wander through a dozen different topics and could go on for hours at a time.

*I'm thankful that, even though I don't see you every day, you're still around.

*I'm thankful for the optimism you either naturally have or force yourself to carry, and that you manage to carry it in a manner that isn't at all overbearing.

*I'm thankful to have someone around who, as far as I've been able to tell over the years, gets me. I wish I had the chance to know you better.

Happy Thanksgiving early, everyone! If you look for ways to stretch the whole experience out over a full week instead of just one day, I promise it only gets better.

NaNoReMo and Lake Emily

I only have a short post tonight, since all of my writing energy is being directed in a very specific direction these days. However, I want to make sure the blog is still getting enough oxygen to stay conscious, and posting a progress update is a good way of keeping myself accountable, so....

A few weeks back I mentioned here that I wouldn't be participating in National Novel Writing Month this year for the first time since 2008. Now that November is officially halfway over, I can honestly say I have no regrets about that decision. Fifty thousand words written in even semi-coherent order in a month is no small feat, and I have nothing but admiration for anyone who dares to accept that challenge. For me though, at least this year, it was more important to work on my 'Lake Emily' revisions, so I proclaimed November to be my very own National Novel Revising Month.

So far it's been a month of scrambling at school to reduce the work I need to bring home to an absolute minimum (which wouldn't be such a bad plan all year, really), letting the DVR slowly fill, waking up early, staying up late, and listening to a lot of nine-minute Iron Maiden songs to get myself in the proper mindset to tell this story. I'm very happy with the work I've done so far. I'm ecstatic about the outlining I've done and the new directions everything is heading, but I have to own up to it being a slower process.

Not a surprise, really -- when your #1 goal is to build word count, you don't always have to work so thoughtfully. Revising, though? Totally different. Everything is about thoughtful and careful and deliberate, to the point where I spent the better part of two hours this morning fighting with a section that was only about 700 words long. It was totally worth it though, because they were 700 tremendously important words, and getting them locked down in the proper order has been an obstacle I've been fighting with for a long time now. With any luck I'll reread that same passage tomorrow night and it won't completely suck, then I can lock it down as part of the revision.

Maybe I'll be done on the 30th; I'm sure going to try. Having a nice long Thanksgiving weekend away from school will help with that. It will be nice to finish this version, and super nice since I can already see how much better it's going to be than it was before. I'd sure like to live in a December where I wasn't plowing through life in overdrive, so that's motivating me. Plus I've got two other big external motivators driving me forward: One is a huge, and still unlit, Vanilla Bourbon Yankee Candle sitting next to my computer screen like a babysitter, reminding me what I should be doing instead of taking ridiculous Facebook quizzes when I sit down in the office to work. The other is the awful feeling that I might be the one nerd left in the gaming world who isn't yet hip-deep in playing Fallout 4.

Since I'm not even allowing myself to buy the game until I'm finished with revising, that's really starting to itch....