Pertinent to my Interests

This year I couldn’t decide on a new year resolution. Am I always trying to improve my eating habits and exercise more? Yes. And I find it so utterly boring. It’s a major part of my life that needs work, yes, but God isn’t there more to life than Jillian Michaels Ripped in 30?

So I have my fitness/eating goals as a background resolution. Every month I start fresh and if I meet my goals for that month I get a little prize.

But I also set a separate resolution for each month, something new and different and interesting. Or something that I really need to get done.

This month’s resolution had to do with finishing the house. We’ve lived here six months now, and we’re doing okay–there are only three boxes still left to unpack and they are full of books that we don’t have a shelf for yet. But I also haven’t hung much art on the walls. The boys have these old dressers in their rooms that we inherited from the previous owners and these dressers suck. The attic annex playroom is kind of a mess.

My goal this month was to finish the boys’ rooms, finish the attic annex, and hang some pictures on the second floor and in my bedroom.

I did not accomplish my goals. The boys’ rooms are closer to done. They have much better dressers from IKEA. We finally got a bed frame for my youngest so his mattress is no longer just plopped on the floor. He and I both also got new desk chairs for our desks.

I did get some art hung in the upstairs hallway. I did not get anything hung in my room. I did not get started on any of my attic annex project.

And I didn’t make my fitness and eating goals for this month either.

I am trying to remind myself that influenza took a whole week from me, and threw everything off schedule, but it’s still a frustrating way to kick off the new year.

Today is February 1 and this month’s resolution might be easier. We will see.

(Written last Saturday, 1/24.)

Influenza A has come for my family.

My youngest woke up with pink cheeks last Sunday morning: red flag. Temperature in the 99s: not a fever, but definitely a red flag.

Flu season: red flag.

I dug up a covid/flu test and within thirty seconds the diagnosis was in: influenza A.

Today is Friday, so my youngest is on Day Six of the flu. My oldest is on Day Five. I am on Day Three. My husband is the last man standing.

You guys know I like to tell you long-winded stories about my life, and even influenza cannot change this about me. I present to you: All The Times That Casey Has Had The Flu.

December 2005

I was home for Christmas from my senior year at college. On December 23, my mother began to feel ill and soon became a part of the couch.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll take care of you and make Christmas dinner.”

On Christmas Eve, I began to feel ill and soon became a part of the other couch.

“It’s okay,” I gasped through the fever. “My sister can take care of us and make Christmas dinner.” My sister’s eyes widened and she backed slowly down the stairs.

No, actually my sister took pretty good care of us, delivering Theraflu and water at regular intervals. This was my first time having the flu, and I was miserable with the fever. I remember being soaked in sweat for days, and so sick I couldn’t make it to my basement bedroom. I slept in my mom’s room on the main floor with her.

I don’t think we had Christmas dinner in the end.

November 2009

Anyone who has known me for more than ten minutes has already heard this story, but I’m going to tell it anyway.

My husband and I had just moved to a new apartment in Queens. Our furniture hadn’t been delivered from storage yet–we were temporarily sleeping on a borrowed air mattress with a set of sheets and only our coats for blankets. We had big plans to get some painting done before our stuff arrived, and we had walked back and forth to the Sherwin-Williams store with heavy paint buckets, paint supplies, and a really nice stepstool.

My husband started to feel ill almost immediately when we got back from the paint store. He became one with the air mattress quickly. I did not realize what was happening and instead of running to the local pharmacy for sick supplies, I foolishly started prepping for painting.

I was also sick the next day. And the day after. I think. We lost some days in there–I am still not sure how many. I mostly just remember waking up from fever dreams and being aware that the sheets were soaked and the air mattress was running out of air, but I wasn’t able to do anything about either of these problems. I don’t remember if I was even aware of my husband suffering on the other side of the air mattress.

I remember trying to take a shower on the first day that I was feeling better. I stood in the shower for about thirty seconds before realizing I had made a terrible mistake. I enjoyed a nice sit-down shower that day, and several days after that.

This was the sickest I have ever been, and I am a little surprised I didn’t die. We figured out later that we were likely part of the swine flu epidemic that had engulfed New York City that year.

This round of influenza has been significantly easier than my first two experiences, and it occurs to me that this is the first time I’ve gotten the flu since I started getting the annual flu shot in 2010. Like I said earlier, I’m on Day Three, and I’ve already showered standing up. I am going up and down stairs and cleaning up the kitchen again. A truly miraculous recovery.

We did eventually get the painting done in our new Queens apartment, after the furniture was delivered. And we still have that nice stepstool from that Sherwin-Williams. I think about the swine flu every time I use it.

YOSHI IS THE BEST

YOSHI IS THE BEST

YOSHI IS THE BEST

YOSHI IS THE BEST

BETTER THAN ALL THE REST

YOSHI IS THE BEST

YOSHI IS THE BEST

YOSHI IS THE BEST

ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES YOSHI EVEN COOLER

YOSHI IS STILL THE BEST

I am really struggling with work lately.

I wrote back in December about how work was getting both easier and harder. Now it’s just harder.

The surge of ICE agents in Minnesota has had a profound effect on my school. It was bad in December, and it has been far worse since January 7. I am usually pretty good at keeping my inner peace during times of supposed turmoil. I see so many people on social media who are so upset all the time.

“The past ten years have just been really hard,” they say, referencing the nation’s political divisiveness and All The Things.

“Yes, very hard,” I agree, as I narrow my eyes in order to better see their healthy children, secure housing situation, their blossoming career, and their annual international trip. I love you all, my deeply liberal friends, but if I was being honest with you, I would tell you that you are choosing to make your life more difficult by internalizing everything you read in the news and on social media. I don’t buy into the idea that we have to take everything so seriously in order to prove that we are good people.

I am very good at ignoring the handwringing and the angst, and a lot of people have been honest with me and told me that by choosing to ignore what is going on in the world I am benefitting from my white privilege.

This is true. I absolutely am. But it’s my choice to make and I have made it over and over again. There will always be suffering in this world. I am not going to waste this great life I’ve been given by taking on suffering that is not mine. There will be plenty of time for suffering later, or in my next life.

But this ICE surge in Minnesota, this is something I can’t ignore by closing Instagram or scrolling past it in the New York Times.

Here are some moments I would like to share from the last six weeks at work.

“I can’t come to school today because there are too many eye police outside.” This, the voice of one of my favorite second graders, a newish immigrant whose parents speak no English. She had to call the school herself because her parents could not. We all knew what she meant by “eye” police.

“Hi, I’m sorry my kids aren’t in school today; we are moving back to Tucson tomorrow. My abuela had an incident with the ICE yesterday, and she’s fine but it’s just not safe to stay here. Can you pack up my daughter’s inhaler and I think my son left his glasses and coat at school? Can you find them? We have to leave right away.” This family are all citizens, born in the United States, but their skin color and culture has made them a target. They departed for Tucson 48 hours after making that phone call. The boy’s class made cards for him. His teacher cried in the office when she gave them to us.

“I don’t know where my cousin is; I was at the federal building all last week and they still won’t give us any information.” This was our favorite substitute teacher, a Somali-American woman whom we all adore. She did eventually locate her cousin, but he had to wait an entire month for his first hearing. I have not yet heard the outcome of that hearing.

“Please, we are so scared. We have not left the house for a month. We cannot go to work and my son cannot go to school. Please, do you know of anyone who could bring us food?” This came to me over the phone through an interpreter helping me to reach out to a student who had seemingly vanished. I put them on the growing list of families who need food delivery. We moved their bus stop closer to their house to help with safety. Still, he has not come to school.

“It’s just a lot going on my neighborhood right now, you know what I mean? Every day there’s some sort of bullshit going down and I just don’t know if it’s really safe for him to be going to the bus by himself, but I don’t get home from work until eight, so I don’t know what to do.” This from a frustrated Black American mom whose son has been missing the bus due to ongoing ICE activity in their neighborhood.

“The girls can’t come to school today. Their father was detained by immigration yesterday, and they are too worried to come.” These are the words of an uncle of two students at our school, another newish immigrant family. The students’ father had the right documentation and was released a day later, but the girls have not been the same since.

“The following student has been transferred to the online school.” This from an email I have received too many times now as students transfer from our school to my district’s online school. The district took note and we are now offering a virtual option within our school for students who cannot make it to the building safely right now. Hopefully I won’t get this email again this year and we’ll be able to keep our community mostly intact. Still, my heart breaks for the students who I know would rather be at school with their friends and will now be stuck inside on a screen for months on end.

“Her mom texted me that they are moving back to Guatemala.” This has happened twice now with families assessing the situation and deciding that their home country is a better bet at the moment.

“I don’t mean to be alarmist or weird, but here’s my wife’s number in case something happens to me.” This from our principal, a father of three and also the unfortunate first line of defense in all emergency situations.

“When we turned the corner we saw ICE right in front of their apartment building. I didn’t feel comfortable getting in the middle of that. Could you call the family and check on them?” This was from a white mom who is helping to drive some of our non-white students to and from school. We tried to reach the family that day but never did get through. We still don’t know what the situation is.

I feel like a husk of a person when I come home from work every day to my safe house in my safe neighborhood where very little has changed. I want desperately to only exist in this cocoon of stability. But the white privilege spell has been broken, and the suffering has come home into my heart.

These are just families trying to live their lives and raise good kids. How is this helping anyone when parents can’t go to work and kids can’t go to school?

So here I am, finally ready to be outraged, finally ready to join the rest of my friends in indignation. Here I am and all I can find inside of myself is sadness.

We had a small Christmas tragedy mid-December when my cat jumped on the piano and knocked one of the three wise men to the floor, shattering the entire lower half of his body.

Actually, it didn’t feel like a tragedy when it happened. Partially because it was like 6:20 AM and I was frantically trying to do all my last-minute preparations to depart for work. I didn’t even pick up the pieces; I just left all his wise little bits all over the floor to deal with that afternoon.

I was annoyed, but not devastated, because this nativity set is not precious–it’s just a placeholder. And to make this story make sense we have to travel back in time to… I think the 1980s?

My grandmother made a ceramic nativity set for my mom in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Apparently this was A Thing for a little bit, to go to a class and paint this pre-made nativity yourself before firing. My mom’s set is an unusual brown glaze with darker highlights in the folds of clothing. It was the only nativity she had when I was little, and it was my favorite Christmas decor. I loved unpackaging and rediscovering each piece, and carefully setting them on her desk for display. She has other nativity sets now, most of them significantly more beautiful than the brown one, but the weird glazed 1980s set has always been my favorite.

When my husband and I moved to a new apartment in Queens in 2009, I suddenly had the space for a nativity set. What I really wanted was my mom’s set, but that wasn’t going to happen. So I scoured ebay for weeks and finally found this set: made from the same molds with the same figures. Incomplete because it was already missing a camel. Also it’s not brown–it’s painted in actual colors, and it has an unknown woman’s initials carved into the bottom of each figure.

It was strange: the same but different. It was Not Quite Right. But… it was a placeholder. This, I figured, would do until I could convince my mother to pass along her brown set.

So when I returned home from work and finally set to cleaning up the shattered wise man, my initial thought was that the time had come to dispose of this set and ask my mom for hers. After all, you cannot have a nativity set with only two wise men. And–fortuitously–my mom has been making solid progress downsizing her possessions in preparation for a big move to the other side of the state. She is probably done hosting big Christmas celebrations, and it seems reasonable to think she would be ready to hand off her heirloom set to me, her beloved and responsible eldest daughter.

But as I picked up the pieces of my wise man, I was struck by a realization.

I really like this nativity set. It is precious to me. It is not a placeholder, and hasn’t been for years. The colors, which seemed so gaudy to me at first, are actually really lovely and the pieces complement each other really well despite all being painted in different colors. I have repaired the horns on the cow several times over the years, and Joseph’s fingers are glued on at a weird angle (cats are the worst). This is the only nativity set my kids have ever known, and I’ve set it up in two apartments and two houses. I’ve packaged it up in old issues of the New York Times, and old issues of the Star Tribune, and in my husband’s old Christmas sweaters.

I don’t want a different nativity set. I want this one. This is my beloved set.

I fixed the damn wise man. I set up a little workspace with a lamp and some krazy glue and worked that afternoon getting him put back together. The cat watched, unrepentant, from the other side of the table.

I did a pretty good job–he looks okay and stands just fine. His cracks seem to present us with a fun seasonal metaphor (we all get broken on our way to Jesus?). The nativity will live another season, and hopefully another and another after that.

I packed each of them away yesterday with a new reverence.

The last two days have been insane. You would think having so many students absent would make my job easier, but it does not. So many phone calls, all day long! Staff are dropping like flies! And this is not an easy week to get substitutes in the door.

I am drinking massive amounts of water when I’m home. I don’t know why. I guess I think that one is able to pee out germs? I don’t take any vitamins, I don’t have any Emergen-C supplements in the house. I have good intentions to use more hand sanitizer at work and then I continually fail to do so. I’m not enough of a germaphobe! I don’t have a lot going for me here!

I would be in good shape if the magic formula for health was coffee + cheese + going to bed at 9 PM.

Three more days…

Work is getting harder, but not in the way I expected.

As far as the actual workload and my flow, things are going pretty well. I am still learning (I think I will say that phrase every day until I retire), but things are running smoothly. Working at a school is so much easier when you actually know many of the students and families and staff! I recognize phone numbers and voices, and I can anticipate which teachers will need a gentle reminder to turn in their sub plans and which ones will not.

What’s getting harder is due –ironically–to the fact that I know these kids and I know these families and I know the staff.

We have a cadre of students whose families are scared to send them to school due to the immigration raids that are happening in our city. These kids aren’t just a name or a picture or a newspaper story. These kids are real kids with personalities and fun stories to share, and they are missed when they aren’t in school. I know many of their parents, have watched some of them learn an impressive amount of English in a short amount of time. I’ve talked to them about bussing issues and bullying issues and lost winter coats.

And for the most part these are kids who had great attendance before ICE showed up! These are kids who are good classroom citizens, and at a school with a lot of behavior issues, we need all the good citizens we can get.

Oh yes, the behavior issues. Staff are drowning in behavior calls. It’s bad. It’s frustrating. Sometimes it’s enraging.

And sometimes it’s just terrible. If I were to describe some of these incidents to you, you would be horrified. Even the most bleeding-hearted liberal among my friends would declare that prison school was clearly the only option for this child.

And yet…

I have seen these students during better times. I have seen that some of these students are actually quiet, sensitive. Or maybe they are exuberant and helpful on their good days. I have met many of these students’ parents, heard some of the background. I have an idea of the turbulence and chaos that may have occurred at home yesterday, last month, a year ago. A lot of these kids exist at the intersection of good intentions and generational trauma. I would scream racial epithets and destroy school supplies too if I had a parent who didn’t even care enough to get me to school more than once a week.

And then there’s the staff. I know who is going to look stricken on a bad day and who is going to do their best to hide their despair. I know who is drowning in family responsibilities and who is out of sick time, and I know who Just Can’t Anymore. It’s hard to see the kids suffering, but it’s also hard to see my colleagues suffering under the weight of societal and familial ills that we cannot fix at school.

This same stuff was all happening last year too, but it didn’t hit me quite the same as it does now, now that I know everyone. I practice piano in the afternoons and worry about a kid’s unfolding custody situation. I make dinner and I worry about my colleague who cried today after a particularly nasty incident with a student. I sit on the couch reading news reports about immigration raids and think of my favorite second grader missing library day again.

So yes, my job is getting easier in a lot of ways, but harder in so many other ways.

I try to not spend too much time on Facebook, but when I do make my way over there I am inevitably pulled in by the Reels.

Facebook Reels are terrible, but so interesting. I get a lot of cat content tossed at me (A+) and recently a lot of piano content (also A+, I just love piano nerds). I get some deaf culture content, a lot of Disney World stuff, and some teacher-specific reels.

But you know what I get served up the most? A lot of divorce content. And a lot of invisible labor content. You know what I’m talking about, right? The reels where moms share absolutely horrifying stories of how they asked their husbands to do exactly one thing to contribute to the household and their husband just doesn’t do it? And then argues with them and says that because he’s the one who blows the leaves every fall he really shouldn’t have to be responsible for loading the dishwasher every night. In his mind, this shit is already 50/50.

It’s great content because it’s all very enraging, and makes you think. As I was running up and down the stairs with laundry today I was definitely thinking about the wife who said she no longer does her husband’s laundry. And I frequently think about the woman who wondered what it must be like to be a married man and just always magically have toothpaste and soap at the ready.

I have a weird relationship with this content because of two competing feelings within me.

Feeling #1 – Because I was raised by a single mom, I am eternally grateful for every little thing my husband does. If he didn’t do it, I would have to!

Do you know who paid the bills when I was a kid? My mom. Do you know who shoveled the driveway? My mom. She worked, she bought us new clothes, she took out the trash, she sewed Halloween costumes and bought us books. She fixed broken blinds and broken furniture and broken doors. She signed us up to usher at church, she vacuumed, she went the parent-teacher conferences, she did laundry. She yelled “B is flat! B is flat!” from the kitchen when we were practicing piano while she made dinner.

She. Did. Everything.

In my household there is a husband who does a bunch of stuff. He does 99% of the snow shoveling. He sets up auto-pay for all the bills, manages our money, and deals with our taxes. He did all the research for our new winter tires. I was having trouble with a light switch in the den and he fixed it. He programs and troubleshoots the security system. Now that I am working, he gets the kids off to school every morning. He is currently researching new doorbells. I am so glad I don’t have to research new doorbells.

I am certain that I am still shouldering most of the day-to-day labor load of the household, but I am not doing everything. And I think I am much more satisfied with the status quo in this house because I was raised in a household where the expectation is that the mom does everything. So yeah, am I often grumpy about making dinner every single fucking night? Yes. But I’m also really grateful that I didn’t have to string lights on the Christmas tree, and I haven’t bought plane tickets or made car rental reservations in probably ten years.

I have another friend who was raised by a single mom as well, and I have noticed that she never complains about her husband’s contributions (or lack thereof) to the household.

Expectations and experiences really matter here.

Feeling #2 – I am actually very lazy, don’t really want to be the matriarch of a household, and would prefer to not take care of anyone else ever again.

I don’t want to do all the meal planning and grocery shopping and cooking. I don’t want to deal with summer camp signups and figuring out which camps allow you to wear Crocs and which do not. I am so jealous of my oldest kid who does his own laundry now because he is only doing his own laundry! One load, every Saturday, and he’s done! Meanwhile I am hauling three people’s laundry up and down the stairs twice a week.

I am constantly picking up the house, cleaning up the kitchen, making the bed. I am filled with despair when I picture doing this for the rest of my life. There is a reason I am already yearning for assisted living, and the sweet release of death.

It sometimes feels like to be a woman is to take care of everyone and everything. Is there any relationship in a woman’s life where she doesn’t have to take care of the other person? Whether it’s emotional care or physical care, or just making sure a person has clean underwear and doesn’t miss their bus. Even friends and neighbors require some level of emotional labor: checking in via text, planning get-togethers.

It is unending, and I think women in America are starting to see just how much they are doing and also understand just how much they don’t want to do it.

The problem is that we really can’t opt out of most of it. Someone has to make sure our kids have clean clothes every week and eat a vegetable every once in a while. And unfortunately–at least according to these Facebook Reels that I’m watching–most men are unwilling to step up and be in charge of buying new snowpants for their kids once a year.

I once read somewhere that when you delegate a task to someone else you have to let them take ownership of the whole thing, from beginning to end, and that includes the possibility of failure. How many women are okay putting their husbands in charge of dentist appointments, and then also going to be okay with it when the kids don’t make it to the dentist for several years at a time? How many women are going to be okay with their kids missing the field trip because that permission slip just didn’t get signed? Not many.

The stakes are too high, we cannot allow failure when it comes to our children. Therefore, we will never be able to successfully delegate.

I think this is a huge, legitimate reason why so many women my age and younger are opting out of childbearing. They are opting out from endless caregiving.

I myself am trying to opt out of what I can. I moved a bunch of people off of my gift list and onto my husband’s list. (Taking my own advice about delegation: most of the people on his gifting list are people that I don’t think we need to be giving gifts to anyway, so I don’t mind if he fails.) I announced to my extended family that I would not be cooking Christmas dinner this year and we need to find a place that sells premade Christmas meals. (But now my mom is the one volunteering to find a place that makes premade Christmas meals.)

The problem is this: what happens in twenty years when all the women of the world are opting out of caregiving and kinkeeping? What happens when nobody is willing to step up and plan the family trip to Yellowstone? When there are fewer and fewer children in the world and nobody is willing to helm the spring carnival at their school anyway? What happens when husbands and wives aren’t buying gifts for each other or anyone else?

This invisible labor that we so desperately want to opt out of is so crucial to our human culture. We are already so much more isolated than we used to be. When my grandparents were my age, they went to church on Sunday morning, went to a sibling or friend’s house for coffee in the afternoon, and returned to church for evening service. Someone had to volunteer to hand out bulletins, and someone had to volunteer to host coffee, and someone had to wrangle resentful children into the pews twice that day. It was a lot of work, but they spent the entire day engaged with their family and their community. I spent this Sunday doing laundry and wrapping gifts and watching a Christmas movie on Hulu. I didn’t even text any of my friends.

So when I picture a world where women are freed from their domestic and social labors, I don’t love what I see. I want so badly to opt out, but I hate the consequences. Despite their good intentions, I just don’t think men are going to step up and take on much of what we women drop. And our world will be poorer for it in so many ways.

But I so desperately want to quit meal planning!

We are four days into December and my de-Grinch-ification efforts are going well. Presents have been purchased, although not wrapped. We have a tree with ornaments. We have candles, Advent and non-Advent.

I signed up for the gift exchange at work. ME! The Grinch! Signing up for an extra gift purchase! Am I having a stroke?

It was my birthday on Monday. This is the fifth time in my life that my birthday has fallen on the Monday after Thanksgiving, but the first time since 2014. It has been a while!

I am actually a big fan of my birthday’s place on the calendar. December 1 is parked right up next to Thanksgiving, but I’ve never felt like that was a detriment. It’s very separate from Christmas, but still within the Christmas season, which I think makes it more special.

But the Monday after Thanksgiving is a terrible day for a birthday! As I kept saying at work that day, “this is a very Monday Monday.” I know everyone makes fun of that Office Space meme “looks like someone’s got a case of the Mondays” but I truly do struggle on Mondays. Weekend Casey has to relearn what Work Casey does during the week, and working in a school means that shit comes at you hard and fast no matter what day it is. The Monday after the glorious four-day weekend was particularly tough.

But so it goes with adult birthdays, and I did not cook a single meal on my birthday and my family got me a puzzle and a new Nintendo game. No complaints!

It feels like winter here now, which I think is contributing to my general Christmas cheer. It is already time for mittens and hats! I don’t remember the last time we had so much snow and cold in December! It may or may not last, but it’s nice to feel like we might get a real winter this year.

Did I tell you I bought my kids Advent calendars? ME! The Grinch! Advent calendars! I don’t generally approve of Advent calendars. Who needs one more thing to remember to purchase every year? Who needs one more thing hanging around the house for a month? Who needs one more reason to add more candy to your diet in December?

But the kids seem to really like them, and the promise of a tiny piece of candy behind a little cardboard door has been surprisingly effective for getting my youngest out of bed on cold winter weekday mornings. (I only get out of bed during the week because of the promise of hot coffee in my favorite Yoshi mug, so I get it.)

Also we have a gas fireplace in this new house and wow that has been a nice addition to my lifestyle. I literally push a button on the remote control and suddenly have a lovely little fire going in the living room. I think this might be contributing to my Christmas cheer as well. Is it insane that we run the fire almost every day now? It is insane, right?

My blog is fixed! It was broken for weeks, and I could not bring myself to even begin investigating the situation. I have this blog because I want to write, not because I care about encryption protocols! A ten-minute chat with Bluehost tech support solved the issue. If only I had done this weeks ago.

Now I can write about my efforts to de-Grinch-ify myself this Christmas season.

I have been crabby about Christmas since approximately 2014. This was my second Christmas as a pregnant lady, and this time I was also a tired stay-at-home mom of a toddler as well. I was overwhelmed and anxious about adding a baby into the mix, and Christmas just felt like too much that year. My husband had been wanting to get a Christmas tree, and I was staunchly opposed to this. I could see into the future: me, leaking blood and milk everywhere, trying to put ornaments away while simultaneously holding a baby and yelling at the toddler not to touch anything.

No, thank you. Giving birth is enough for one month. I cannot possibly get Christmas put up and then put away as well.

But then my mom came to visit, and added to the chorus of tree requests and we ended up with a beautiful, live Christmas tree in our living room. I am still–almost eleven years later–resentful of this.

Christmas for the last decade has only represented obligation and unobtainable standards for me as a parent, as a wife, as a daughter, in all ways. It is a massive time suck, and causes stress for the entire month of December. It has made me resentful of my children and my spouse and my extended families and friends.

After years of loving Christmas, I just hated it.

And then two things happened last Christmas:

1. A coworker who I like but am not particularly close to gave me a small gift. It was just a candy tin with a little bow and my name on it. She gave them to many people in the school. But the candy was delicious, the tin was adorable, and the gift was entirely unexpected. I felt appreciated. I felt surprised. I felt seen. I felt… the Christmas spirit?
2. We went to a Christmas display in the next neighborhood over. A local man has saved some old Christmas window displays from a long-gone department store. He is slowly refurbishing them and exhibits them at his home during the Christmas season. I am not from around here, I have no emotional connection to these window displays, but we went to see them and let me tell you I have never felt the Christmas spirit so strongly as I did that night. The air was electric with joy, nostalgia, delight, appreciation. This man is bringing so much joy to so many people, just because. I felt… moved?

I don’t want to be the Grinch on the hill, angry about Christmas and other people’s happiness. I want to be Ebenezer Scrooge singing and twirling my way down a cobblestone street with a small parade of Muppets behind me and a Christmas turkey for the Cratchits under my arm.

So I am making some changes to our Christmas programming this year. There is so much that I do love about Christmas (the lights! baking cookies! doing puzzles! Christmas music! Christmas movies!) and really only one thing that I hate about Christmas. It seems over the years I have allowed that one thing I passionately hate to contaminate the things I do like.

I hate buying gifts. I hate it so much. It takes a massive amount of time and money. I am never satisfied with what I’ve purchased, and always feel that I have disappointed everyone with my lackluster gift-giving. The list of people to buy for grows every year, unending. And while I do not consider myself the moral police on this matter, I do think we all just have way too much stuff. All of us. And we get too much stuff every Christmas. I know it’s terrible, but I think I am opposed to the idea of gift-giving at its very core.

(An aside: I do realize it’s ridiculous for me to be so opposed to gift-giving when I listed the receiving of an unexpected consumable gift as a moment of Christmas spirit above. But I think the key for me is in the two adjectives: unexpected and consumable.)

This year I am doing the minimum of gift shopping. I sat down yesterday and made a list of people I want to buy gifts for and ended up with thirteen names. I have to ask my youngest if he wants to get a gift for his classroom teacher, so that will bring us up to fourteen if he does. But those fourteen names are it, the end. Some of those names have children attached to them and in theory I should be getting gifts for those generations as well. But you know what? Just because I have been buying a gift for your mom for the last twenty years doesn’t mean that I am obligated to give you one too. Let the more generous among us enjoy that strategy, it is not for me.

So here I go, hopefully embarking on a Christmas season with a little more joy and a little less stress, and better memories for my kids in which I am a Muppet delight to be around and not a fucking monster.