We have one car that’s a champion in the snow but mice have crawled up inside the dashboard and nested in the airbag system. My warning light has been illuminated as reminder that when I fishtail and throw a 360 on slick, icy roads, I’m SOL save for a rodent family that might shoot out the steering wheel to cushion the impact. Considering the size, weight and non-absorbent make-up of the average mouse, I’ve decided to mostly stay home even though the lack of cleaning apparatus and chill of strained relations makes me want to crawl out of my itchy, winter-dry skin and flee to Florida where I hear it’s 80 and humid and there’s no such thing as chapped lips.

I suppose in this confinement, I should continue the job search I began a few days before the X-mas break wherein I write and re-write cover letters and resumes in order to send on-line responses to job listings in which I am only vaguely interested, those that appear on Monster and Craig’s List, knowing all the while that my ten years as a Landscape Designer don’t translate into value as a paralegal or administrative assistant or pharmaceutical representative but there’s always hope that some firm will see that the individual who ran her own company, wrote for a newspaper and also did time in the accounts department in an advertising firm, can and will learn this office stuff quickly and, in the interim, can probably manage the phones and tend to the ailing tropical plants suffering for light beneath the fluorescents.

I make it sound sort of optional, this employment thing but really it’s dire. In the last days of ‘08 we learned that MBH’s company would no longer be covering health insurance for dependents. So we have the expense of three on our plate in the New Year which makes for leaner times in our already skinny lives. And then there’s the latest confession – that neither of us can take one more day in the house together as a couple; working, sleeping, eating, pretending. And so we’re trying to find a way to swing rent. Some way to give ourselves some breathing room. It may, in the end, save us. Or it just may allow us to sever things in a civil manner. Either way, we see the expense as non-optional.

In order to clear the way for this added financial hit, I cancel newspaper subscriptions, I dial back the minutes on the cell phone, I cancel cable and stare meaningfully at the high-speed internet access bill wondering if we can survive on a dial-up. Wondering if the dial-up option still exists? We are wearing long underwear and turning down the thermostats. The dog shivers in her dog bed. The kids play hours of Wii and we let them, because school’s out and the wind blows negative temperatures and it’s free and we ignore their computer game dependence because their bug eyed attention to Madden ‘09 somehow assuages our guilt.

We have yet to break the news to the kids, this separation, which will confuse and disturb them even more than it does us (if that’s possible). And then there is the news to share that we are taking a leave of absence from the Country Club which really doesn’t affect their Winter lives but will completely rock their summer-time existence. I keep reminding myself that there are worse things to suffer than no swim team or tennis or golf but I feel really, really badly about this one. Possibly because we gaveth and now we taketh away. It’s one thing not to know what your missing, it’s another to miss something you once really, really enjoyed. They have friends there. They have known the sweet laze of sultry afternoons spent licking watermelon drips from their sticky arms and jumping in the chill pool to rinse their skin clean. They have known the smell of fresh mown grass on the fairway. They have known the distinct sound of tennis balls bouncing on a clay court. They have learned how to drag the brush and groom the court after play without filling their tennis shoes with clay granules. They have dressed in a sun dress and sandals and little boy khakis with a starched button-down to attend the awards ceremony at summer’s end where they receive recognition for sportsmanship and effort and achievement. They have known what it feels like to belong to this safe place, a place of well-to-do families and blue skies and a snack bar. I feel sad about a lot of things, but mostly I feel sad that I can’t continue to give them the things they have come to know as normal.

So here’s hoping that somehow, some of the next 364 days will find a way to be truly better than this one. Less uncertain and bleak and fearful and nostalgic. And here’s hoping your ‘09 is a good one, better than the last, even if your last wasn’t all that bad, because who doesn’t deserve even better?

I wish I didn’t feel the need to tell the kids that each and every Santa we come across can’t possible be the real deal. I wish I could just let them harbor this seasonal deception. Why do have to get all cynical, smacking my lips with disapproval. “Get a load of that one kids? Look at the black, greasy hair beneath the wig. Smell his Bourbon breath. Mark my words, the real Santa is far too busy this time of year to be drunk at noon on a weekday.” My O and G have learned to out the fakes. They play coy games with the Santa stand-ins, “If you’re the real Santa then YOU can tell ME what I want for Christmas.” There is a moment of uncomfortable chuckling followed by a hostile silence. O and G slowly slip down off of Santa’s lap. Photos seem entirely beside the point. You can practically hear the shop girls sheepishly dressed as elves thinking – HATERS.

This year I have even given up on outdoor lights. It just seems so beside the point. The front of our house cannot be seen from the street yet each year I feel compelled to string the white bulbs on the dwarf spruces by the front door and march out of the house each evening at dusk to plug the damn things in for the pleasure of the one neighbor with whom we share the drive and who hasn’t hung even a wreath four years running. Not this year. No way. You can’t make me like Christmas. I just won’t. Wake me when it’s over and we’ve safely avoided spending thousands of dollars we don’t have. Wake me when I no longer have a wheat allergy and I can actually partake of the Christmas cookie buffet. And not a moment before.

“Okay, are you satisfied NOW that you’ll never get paid to write? Because it’s good time to give up that pipe dream and go get yourself a real job that starts at 9 and ends at 2 and allows for teacher-work days and sick-kid days and whole weeks off while I travel to glamorous places like Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and gives you the summers free so we don’t have to pay for childcare and of course offers dental and benefits because, after all, such a job that pays more than $9 an hour must exist, you just haven’t looked hard enough, in fact you haven’t looked at all.”

From her defensive crouch, she shot back,

“Right, sorry, I must have been too busy preparing meals and supervising homework and completing Ben Franklin projects and schlepping our kids to piano and baseball and tennis and coaching soccer and making sure there’s food in the fridge and paying all the bills on time and shoveling the back porch and mowing the lawn and stripping wallpaper and painting the interior of the entire fucking house and posting five days a week on my blog and writing a novel and volunteering in the each child’s classroom and helping Gladys pay her rent to have properly looked for a job that could fit nicely into the 15 minutes of me-time I enjoy on the couch each night post-8 p.m. when the kids have been bathed and read to and tucked in multiple times and the cat has finished vomiting up a hairball on the carpet and the five loads of daily laundry are folded and put away because that’s exactly when I feel like kicking it into high gear and getting off my lazy ass to go out and earn myself a living because all this other stuff is just joy and sunshine, hardly a day at all.”

She can tell that today is going to require some serious house cleaning therapy. The Windex is out, the murky glass just asking for a good spring shining. Did she mention that all of her friends, neighbors and acquaintances pay $300 twice a year to have their windows cleaned? She’ll let that fact speak for itself.

There’s no mild segue back to obligation and necessity in my life, it’s just one giant muddle of minor mishaps that bundle up and make me want to keen and rant and flee to dark corners. I suppose it began before we even left, when I retrieved the luggage from the attic only to find that one of the fucking cats has been using the L.L. Bean Duffle bag as a litter box. (Have I mentioned how much I hate my cats?) Both felines were sternly reprimanded. The cat box was thoroughly cleansed and fresh litter applied just in case the cat in question was objecting to the general condition of the facilities. But then I remembered that the little one, the black and tan whiskery runt, once shat on my daughter’s sleeping bag that we kept beneath our bed to accommodate childish night wanderings and the need to sleep close to parental looking people in order to fool the Boogie man. Before our flight, a new piece of luggage was purchased at Marshall’s to the tune of a $100. (We gave up on the sleeping bag idea a long time ago.)

And then there’s the dog that, while kenneled during our vacation, was diagnosed with Lyme disease and administered antibiotics that must be continued for at least a month, twice a day, at $55 a bottle. When I inquired about the efficacy of the Lyme disease vaccination I seem to remember paying $64 for back in September, I was told that no vaccination is one hundred percent effective. “Oh I see, I see,” said the dumb blond, realizing she’d been fleeced by the over-entrepreneurial veterinarian.

With the all pets accounted for and expensive, it’s on to the children who both have dental appointments next week. Dental appointments? Wasn’t it just weeks ago that I was writing posts about extractions and nitrous oxide? Upon checking the dates, I have confirmed that it has been six months since the last frightfully expensive trip to the dentist. Time to steal ourselves for the next installment in the ongoing saga to save my son’s teeth.

This appointment is ill timed to coincide with some other major expenditures: the kids’ piano tuition is due today – we pay for lessons up front, their ten week tennis clinic must be paid for on Friday (after all, tennis is a life-sport), if O wants to play Spring baseball he must register and pay by week’s end though practices don’t start until April, my niece has a birthday tomorrow, my sister-in-law turns forty next Monday and my step-mother-in-law will be the big five-0 in six days, (both adults expect significant gifts, the child will be happy with a book). Oh, and the car won’t start and apparently needs a new battery, the plow company has just sent the bill for clearing our significant seasonal snowfall and the country club that we already can’t afford has sent notice that the membership dues have been “reassessed”, which is their refined way of saying bend over while we stick this bill up your arse along with your mortgage company and your insurance company and every other organization that has raised its rates in the first quarter of this new year.

And, and, and… I could go on, but let me just share the kicker.

This weekend, while playing Madden Football on the Wii (have I mentioned just how much I loathe the Wii?), O stepped backwards on one foot while shaking his numchuck furiously and cursing at the screen (which is apparently how all Wii games are played, sort of tipsy and wild, half blind with frustration), just as the dog was slipping along behind him. Ass over tea kettle he went and came crashing down on the coffee table, snapping it in two. Legs splintered (the table’s not his), the whole mahogany, antique thing of it unsalvageable.

I didn’t adore the table but it was old and finer than anything we could have bought on our own as it was inherited from my father-in-law who upgraded to a cushy, sueded, ottoman-type of coffee table sometime back. I’ve done the research and a replacement table of the same period and provenance as the one now dismembered in my basement will cost between $500 and $1500. For now we will make due with the table we bought at a yard sale back in ‘92. It has been in storage for just such an occasion, (the complete destruction of all things finer) and anxiously awaiting a relaunch. It is tired and worn and completely too modern for our entirely antique home, in other words, it’s a design disaster. But it’s seen some action. It was the sole table in our collegiate flop pad and having served the needs of five delinquent academics, I think it can handle anything the Wii, my children and my three pets have to offer. Just don’t expect an invitation for coffee anytime soon.

While minor sacrifices, like no Margaritas at the Mexican restaurant last weekend (the first restaurant meal of the thirty day stretch), are easy to make, major adjustments have also been made. I was able to decline an invitation to head North for a weekend of skiing. After tallying the cost of long underwear and lift tickets and equipment rental and ski instruction and food and the gas to get us there, the answer was obvious. The old me would have accepted the offer and hoped that the credit card had sufficient balance to support our vacation. The new me measured the price of our pleasure and decided against the trip. I’ve been told that skiing is a blast. I also know, first hand, what a drag it is to sit home on a cold weekend in January. But it’s absolutely no fun to pay for a $1000 weekend well into summer.

In the past thirty days I’ve had to be thrifty, using gift certificates and frequent shopper coupons to purchase next month’s book group selection. A good book is always a justified expense. A good book that costs $4 is a victory. In the spirit of the game, I have been avoiding catalogs and slick fashion mags and Elle Decor. Its best NOT to know what I’m missing.

We’ve made pizza, three times in four weeks, instead of ordering from a local pizza joint. We have come to like our own creation better than the delivery variety. Each time the dough is a bit different, we select a fancy mozzarella and concoct a fresh sauce, all in pursuit of the perfect pie. We are close, we are very close. We joke that once we’ve got it, that secret and perfectly delectable recipe, we’ll open our own pizza place, called We,The Pizza . We laugh and feel clever.

But here’s where the fun stops. My Better Half, swept up in the spirit of the thing, has made a suggestion, a staggering and solemn suggestion that would, indeed, save us $70 a month but is surely the end of lighthearted fun and the beginning of something permanently spartan and unpopular.

“Let’s get rid of Verizon Fios,” he said and, game over, I wanted to weep. I even surprised myself with my own visceral and dramatic reaction. I wouldn’t even call us a television family. The kids aren’t allowed to watch t.v. during the week and are only allowed a movie or a televised sports event on Sunday. My Better Half and I rarely watch live broadcast network television and prefer to catch up on popular HBO series via Netflix. But there’s a feeling of freedom that our cable package with rewind and pause and high-def, affords us, even if we don’t use it all that much. When American Idol airs at 8 and I’m still reading a story or putting away laundry, there is comfort in the fact that I can kind of float downstairs twenty minutes post start-time and back the whole thing up to the first contestant. I miss nothing and gain the ability to skip through irritating commercials. It’s a beautiful thing.

And then there’s the tricky business of watching whole tennis tournaments. First, the early rounds are only available on cable and then, of course, they are aired during the week, usually during the work day when it is important to look busy with things other than watching tennis tournaments. So there’s only one way to watch televised tennis and that’s with the ability to tape, replay and fast forward at will.

Also, the cancellation of cable would mean the end of The Daily Show as I know it, which is a day late by necessity. I simply can’t stay up that late and must catch up with Jon Stewart after the fact. Better late than never. The cancellation of cable would mean no more 30 minute stints with Cesar Milan and the wayward dogs of California. (Is it me or is the canine population of LA particularly prone to aggressive behavior and peeing on the sofa?)

So I moaned and stuttered and held on to the furniture for support, trying desperately to justify the expense, wondering where would the cancellation of cable leave me but hopeless and abandoned and utterly entertainment-free?

(Before I can answer that question, a thank you is in order. I want to express my gratitude to the one individual who actually purchased something via my Amazon links on this blog. I don’t know who you are or what item you actually bought but the $1.09 in my Amazon Affiliates account warms my heart and makes me feel just a little bit closer to keeping my cable habit. Never mind that in order for Amazon to cut a check, I’ll need to earn another $98.91. After a whole year of linking products and posts, I’m on my way.)

Now back to the cable issue-gasp, gawk – I’d rather begin walking to the grocery store with my wheel barrow and a bunch of those string sacks that environmentally conscious people use instead of plastic. Is that sacrifice enough to keep the cable? I could bike the three miles to tennis. I could wear outerwear in the house and knock the thermostat down to 60 degrees. I could shower but once a week and knit my own socks but getting rid of digital video recording? I just don’t think I can do it.

And, now that I’ve got some remove from that uncomfortable conversation, I can see how this ‘poor mouse’ thing might have legs. I can limp about and lament my having no money for simple things like movies and coffee and new espadrilles for my trip to Florida and friends and family will buy me things and take me places and feel charitable and good.

I might never have to spend another non-obligatory dime. But then (sigh) I would have to swallow a whole heap of pride and get past the fact that other people’s consumption on my behalf does not solve the global problem, it just solves my problem. It is after all an exercise in restraint, an existential shake up, if not a subtle veil for the stark reality that is my checking account.

So bear with me friends while I beg off anything fun and interesting for the next 60 days. It is not your company I eschew. Really, it isn’t. Lenny Kravitz isn’t feeling the love either, nor is the shoe department at Nordstrums or the Boston Flower Market or Whole Foods or Amazon.com or the sweet little gift shop in the center of town that sells a darn good mocha latte and the most adorable chocolates from France.

And I have to report that I’m more than a little stymied by the thorough reference list I’ve been asked to provide. Having been sitting in front of a home computer for two years, it’s almost an impossibility to come up with three relevant business or community references that can speak of my relative sanity. I suppose the mail man knows I’m reliable in that I answer the bell when it is rung and I often put the flag up on the mailbox when sending out-going letters. The neighbor can be contacted as to my strict adherence to schedules. My lawn gets mowed on a regular basis. I’ve been known to fertilize and apply lime supplements. I’ve got general yard maintenance standards and this should count for something.

It’s shame My Better Half can’t write a recommendation as I’m sure he’d be glad to enlighten the management over at Elder Services as to my unyielding and dogmatic nature. It would read something like this, “CCE is an individual with steady resolve and unwavering expectations. It is she, after all, who plagues me day in day out about placing clothes in the hamper and dishes in the dishwasher and not wearing my slippers out of doors. It is she who practically wrote the book on industry and perseverance in the face of household dirt and pet hair on the couch. CCE has an expert’s sense of when to tighten the reins in order to suppress disorderly conduct. She has no problem doling out rebukes and maintaining order with well timed sighs and ominous silences. She’s no stranger to emphasis and will slam drawers and doors with impunity.”

Or perhaps one of you, my loyal readers, could make a pitch for my professional worth. After all I am here day after day, entertaining the five of you with haphazard words slung sloppily across the web page. You could mention that my typos are only occasional and that my story choices are sometimes amusing and, occasionally, maybe once or twice, actually border on brilliance.

And while I’m suffering my charitable-block with dignity, I contemplate Mad Hatter’s willingness to throw off the chains of commerce and consumption and give it all up for eight weeks of self-imposed asceticism. She dangles the challenge before the rest of us, taunting us to join her in the decision to buy only necessities for the next two months, sixty days of nothing but groceries and medicine and gas. And I think, hell yeah, why not? It’s not too different from the reality I’m already living. With little spare change rattling around in the MadMarriage coffers, every non-essential purchase is dissected and discussed and the source of great dissension.

I’m willing to pass the local Starbucks with nary a wave, to fill my own thermos with tap water before the daily trip to the gym, to eat lunch at home and snack from the cupboard. But I have some unanswered questions. Is it only products that I must eschew or is it service as well? My confusion and apprehension stems from the impending need for a hair cut and highlights, from the spousal b-day looming on the horizon of mid-January, from the weekly fee required to secure court time for a Sunday match, from a dentist appointment, the first for G in nearly a year, from the fact that the babysitter will surely want dollar bills not a dozen home-made cookies after her evening here with the kids on the 18th.

Does the bottle of wine we like to consume on weekend nights count as a grocery item or is this something we must give up in the bargain? Does the download of the new Lenny Kravitz MP3 release count as consumerism or is it art appreciation, particularly because the required transaction takes place in the ether of the internet…no packaging, no immediate exchange of cash just a future credit card bill and one new song on the MP3 player?

Having no answers to above the questions, here’s the best I’m willing to do…no cosmetics, no clothes, no gifts to self (like scented candles or house plants or cut flowers or new novels), no bottled waters or cafe coffee, one meal out a week and only a cheap, non-fancy meal at someplace only a rung up the ladder from fast-food, one bottle of wine a week, one gift for my suffering spouse unfortunate enough to have been born just three weeks post-X-mas, only school supplies for the kids, (stuff like erasers and notebooks and glue sticks), no dreams of new furniture or rugs or refurbishments of bathrooms until March, one evening out on the 18th while employing a sitter at home who will be paid in cold hard cash, one trip to the salon to hide the roots and get my ritual 12 week styling. ( I swear I won’t do it again for another 12 weeks. I think I deserve congratulation on my willingness to go 3 months without a haircut. I know women and men who insist of five weeks, some even four. I’m a hair hero in comparison), one additional day on the tennis court a week (my two day minimum has already been paid for, everything else is cake), no MP3 downloads for the entire 8 week period (did I say none, maybe I meant one but we’ll see how it goes). So there, I’m out of breath and out of time but I’ll fill you in on any other exceptions I think of along the way. Will the eight week period of anti-consumerism help the bottom line? Probably not a whole lot seeing as we’re already keeping things pretty spare, but it’s a good exercise, a thoughtful pause before slapping down the card is always a good thing. Here’s hoping it’s not too painful.

Any challenges you all feel like sharing while I’m in the competitive mood?

Yesterday, 7:30 a.m., I received a call from my son’s teacher – Mr.S. There are few people I care to talk to at such an early hour. He is an exception, an affable, boyish, disorganized exception. He was calling to say that the party I had planned for the class will have to be rescheduled due to his forgetfulness. It appears the children have a school sponsored sing-a-along, the timing of which completely conflicts with our holiday fete. Usually such a snafu would have me cursing the ineptitude of the teacher at fault but this is Mr. S, so I calmly said, “It’s not a big deal that I now I have to call 25 parents and beg their forgiveness for changing the party time just two days in advance. Actually, it’ll give me a chance to connect with other Mom’s and Dad’s. It’s a blessing, a total blessing.”

With my forgiveness apparent, I could sense his relief. He explained that he has been tired and less than productive lately. He has had trouble keeping appointments and remembering scheduled events. A few months ago, he and his wife purchased their first home. And have spent every minute of their free time and every spare penny renovating the top floor as an apartment. They need to take on a tenant who will pay rent and help them pay their mortgage. The renovations have been costly and excruciatingly slow as they have only weekends to devote to laying new floors and replacing windows. He and his wife are exhausted and broke and losing faith in their ability to get the project done before the holidays. His despair, when he mentioned that he had little to give his most deserving wife this holiday season, was palpable and true.

He explained, rather sheepishly, that his plans for a X-mas gift for her are, in fact, a little home spun. He floated his idea out there as if hoping I wouldn’t laugh or scoff or otherwise deem it foolish and pathetic. Instead, hearing the earnestness in his voice, I wanted to sing out – “Oh, young love, Oh, the Spirit of Christmas. I am restored.”

Without a penny in his pocket, he will develop and draft a blue print for an artist’s studio. He will build this little space entirely devoted to his wife’s artistic gifts in the basement of their new home. He will deliver the scrolled plans, all bows and promises, with an IOU to begin work on it as soon as their tenant is installed in the upstairs apartment. I said, “This, Mr. S, is an excellent plan.” It’s so Gift of the Magi, so perfect with the spirit of Christmas. And like the character in the O’Henry story, his name is Jim. And his wife is Julie which isn’t exactly Della but has the same number of letters. I am so happy for this Julie who has a husband who gets it. And, simultaneously, I could die, pining away with wishing for someone to make ME a writer’s studio in the empty upstairs bedroom that has been home to only the cat litter-box for two years.

I can only hope that his wife has not sold her paint brushes on Ebay in order to purchase him a new belt sander of nail gun. Because, let it be said, “…that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.” (O’ Henry)

It’s deciding to make holiday cookies with the kids. Beginning the project with visions of iced snowflakes, all delicate home spun decoration, and Santa’s with bright red frosting, the fur lined coat made of carefully piped frosting, his boots black with tinted sugar and, instead, having your children insist on making only gingerbread men so they can remove their heads and create homunculous-people, cookie freaks with eyes where their necks should be. It’s pulling out the camera to photograph the whole floury, freakish cookie mess to find that the digital jobbie reads ‘ERROR’. You remove the battery. You turn it on and off. You knock it firmly on the counter and still, it reads ‘ERROR’. You realize all of X-mas will go undocumented because nowhere in the 1200 page manual does it reference the ‘ERROR’ problem. Not in Japanese or German or Spanish or Dutch.

It’s hosting a tree trimming party, setting it up to look just as it does in the magazine spread, pineapple glazed ham and garlic bread crumb macaroni and cheese, a roaring fire and a lifetime’s accumulation of ornaments waiting to festoon the tree. And finding that real, non-magazine spread children are actually suspicious of garlic and sharp cheddar. Real non-magazine spread children whine for hot dogs and don’t give a damn about the provenance of each tiny ornament as they tear into the box spraying tree trimming materials across the living room. Ornaments shatter, cast aside for the dog to consume. No child wears a bow tie or knickers, instead there are faded jeans and torn sweat shirts. There are uncombed hairs and unbrushed teeth and some eight year old’s condemnation of Ella Fitzgerald’s version of Winter Wonderland. “Who’s singing this garbage? It sucks,” he says. He is your son, apparently deaf, who dares to insult Ella on X-mas.

It is four dozen mint chocolate cookie bars baked, frosted and chilled, forty copies of the recipe painstakingly made into paper stars for the cookie swap party that is, hours later, canceled. A snowy winter’s night. Impassable roads. A day’s labor all packaged up and nowhere to go but into the freezer.

It’s buying a garland of white spruce and weaving it round the banister. Adding twinkling lights and a gold leaf swag. Admiring the fresh greens for only a day before the needles start dropping, inciting thoughts of flammability – the whole house torched for the love of one god damned festive banister. It is removing the holiday fire hazard some ten days before X-mas and clogging the vacuum hose with pine needles. It is hauling the Electrolux Diplomat all the way across state borders to have white spruce needles removed from its internal organs.

It is renting the modern Peter Billingsley classic, A Christmas Story, with the glee of finally being able to share the Red Rider bee-bee gun and the belching furnace and the little brother dressed up tight as a tick in his snow clothes with your own children, only to find your youngest unmoved by the comic brilliance. She says over and over again, “When is it going to get funny, Mom? You promised it would be funny.” And your oldest child asks pointed and uncomfortably mature questions about the narration, “What does he mean when he says ‘like sex illuminated in the window, Mom’?” “Oh nothing, honey,” you’ll say and find him googling ’sex’ later on because you wouldn’t answer his simple question.

It’s ‘Dreaming of a White Christmas’ right along with Elvis and Bing and Frank and Billie Holiday before you realize that a white Christmas translates into two snow days with the kids home from school, house bound due to frigid temperatures; several horrible icy wipe outs while carrying boxes addressed to family that live in Florida and Georgia (they have no idea); one bruised and swollen elbow having been pinched gruesomely between the heavy sliding doors of your ancient garage while trying to find the snow shovel; and a driveway that could be used for speed skating drills but, instead is the harrowing, slick trail of death you must brave each day on the way to school, to the gym, or to the mail box.

It is expecting that people show some self restraint and leave the boxes that UPS and FedEX insist on leaving at the top of your driveway-of-death well enough alone, but instead find that someone grinchy has actually begun stealing them. It is eight days before Christmas and panicked re-orders and phone calls are made to complain to package delivery services about theft and liability and the tears your children will weep on Christmas when their gifts from Santa never arrive.

And finally, it is taking the kids to the library and checking out Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol to be read in front of the fire at night, only to find that the late 19th century masterpiece is too dense, too inaccessible. The kids are confused by intricacies of past, present and future. They give up and have fallen fast asleep on the couch by the time you utter the famous phrase, “What’s Christmastime to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books, and having every item in ‘em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,’ said Scrooge indignantly, ‘every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!’” And just a little bit of you agrees.

Driving around town, one would think that Old Saint Nick was beating an immediate path to our doors, like tonight, this afternoon, visiting only those previous and industrious enough to have the twinkling lights of holiday debt already erected in their living rooms.

While the bittersweet berries, their yellow beads bursting forth the fiery orange of November, still grace the mantel and the dining room table in my house, our neighbors have draped spruce boughs over their front doors and have erected glaring spotlights to shine notice on expensive evergreen wreaths with velvet ribbons. Everyone around here has moved right past Turkey Day and onto Santa door mats, white lights and giant inflatable Rudolphs. I’m still trying to sell my family portions of leftover stuffing as adequate school snack while invitations for cookie swaps and Christmas brunches arrive at my door. I’m just not ready yet.

Because I am a planner, all this premature decoration makes me wildly anxious. As if all these well decorated homes house residents who have long been done with their holiday shopping and are now laughing down their noses at the rest of us, pointing their superior fingers at our barren front porches.

I know people, people I find worthy of suspicion, who shop all year, quietly amassing a heap of gifts that just need to be boxed and wrapped and shipped out come December. I’ve always marveled at this practice. Wondering how anyone has extra cash laying around with which to purchase X-mas gifts in July?

Just yesterday a friend told me about Turkey Hill Tree Farm. According to her this farm offers the best Frasier Firs in the area. “A whole month in the house with the heat on and not a needle lost.” She said I better call right away. Turkey Hill is popular with premature decorators.

After several minutes on hold, a frazzled and curt Turkey Hill employee answered my call and kind of laughed at me. “Frasier Firs? The 8′ variety? You should have tagged one of those three weeks ago,” he said as if he’d been saying this very same thing, over and over for days. He might as well have chanted it….You should have/ You should have/ You should have.

It is November 27th and Larry over at Turkey Hill is laughing at me. I’m SOL, behind the eight ball, no place to go but the supermarket for my balsam evergreen that will shed great heaps of needles on the carpet and end up, somehow, in the closets upstairs, on the bedspreads, in the litter box on the third floor. But not yet, damn it. There will be no festive holiday cheer around here until Saturday, December 1st and not even then because I’ll be in Florida for the weekend drinking Rum Runners and sifting sand with my toes and pretending that this whole Christmas thing isn’t really happening at all.