Whether you are ready or not, even if your wish list is not made or your Christmas toilet paper that says ‘He sees you when you’re pooping’ is not yet in your guest bathroom that also has the Christmas towels that men are not supposed to touch, but we do…

guess what…Christmas 2024 is nearly here!

I am trying to do better. I dread fall holidays now, but I’m giving it the ole college try this year. They start earlier now and there are so many more things to do with each holiday that we didn’t have growing up.

Pumpkin fests and pumpkin parties start the season now. And they start so early! It’ll be late summer and I’m still floating around in a swimming pool lounge chair with an adult beverage, smelling like Coppertone, listening to the Mamas and the Papas while I’m happily enjoying the next skin cancer I’m creating. Just chilling away in my trunks and then suddenly the radio by the pool is talking about when the Great Pumpkin is coming to a farm near us.

I ain’t even done with summer yet, peoples……!

Holidays are a wonderful time of the year though. But life seems to spin out of control once they start and ain’t nobody or nothing where it’s supposed to be and we all are tired and ragged, albeit festive, souls stressed out and bout ready to take to drankin or eating gummies to cope with all of this holiday cheer. 

But we just have to move forward, you know? Gone are the days of oranges and apples on hot school buses from our bus drivers for our Christmas presents, watching Snoopy and eating off TV trays by electric stack heaters in the wall while we stuck to our Naugahyde couches.

It’s 2024 and we gotta learn to Tic our Toc around the Christmas tree now and most of my fellow Boomers, I think we are doing pretty good with adjusting. I saw a Boomer the other day with a wreath on the front bumper of their minivan already.

Those are my people. 

And I only know two or three people that have taken to drankin to cope with where the green and red bows go and who’s making what for which gathering and when? So I think the old people are gradually getting used to the normal confusion and organized chaos of today’s holidays.

Food. Lordy Mercy, Food is everywhere right now? And despite my best efforts at gym daily with a cripple ankle, I’m right in there with the best of these food shenanigans. I’ve made spice apple cake for Thanksgiving. And then I made an amazing chocolate lava cherry cake that, well I’ll just tell you that  I’d marry the bald man that made that cake, it was that fine. 

And NO Christmas shalt happen in our house without a bowl of orange slices. 

You know those gummy ones that have enough sugar on them to make you vibrate and they stick to your dental implants for the rest of the night? gah I love those at Christmas.

And speaking of holiday food, my mama was always the queen of Christmas foodery. I can’t tell you as a kid how many coconuts that I put nails in, drained the juice out of and then cracked with a hammer and then shelled the white goodness out of those things for my mama to make fresh coconut cakes. She was such a good cook for our family and other families.

But that woman was laid in the ground carrying regret for her bad dressing one year. For whatever reason, her dressing for the turkey went sideways. Hardly any of it was eaten. Mom would ask why nobody was eating it and finally, someone spoke up and told her it was not up to her usual dressing standards. She took a bite of it and ‘self-disappointment’ was the best way to describe her drooped and sad face.

And mom always prided herself on her dressing. She was guilt-ridden over that one wayward pan of dressing. Afterward, she brought that up for several visits.

I do wonder if the Christmas dressing debacle was the beginning of the end of Rebecca. 

But back to today and the holiday situation…

We’re getting there! Grandkids help with the discombobulated feeling of Christmas. When those sweet little girls are around, the rest of the planet can be chaos, tsunamis, and political division and I sit and stare at those two beautiful creations in sheer amazement and love their every little move.

And they move a lot. Last night the oldest was doing some funky 60s dance-free arrangement moves in her pajamas to Snoopy Christmas music while the other ran circles around her in her pajamas and pigtails screaming octaves high enough to shatter my old man glasses.

I asked the youngest granddaughter what was Santa bringing me and the two-year-old said, without hesitation, that I was getting pink hair. So that sweet baby girl with pigtails, right there and then, straight up put me in the Christmas mood.

I need to pat myself on the back; I actually did the Christmas Cards this year! Can I get a ‘ho ho ho’ for that? I mean I designed them, had them printed, addressed them, and Christmas-stamped and mailed the few that were personally sent out. ‘Adulting 301’ is what that is called right there.

I’m attaching the card to this blog to wish Christmas wishes to the rest of the world for 2024.

So sit down, shut up, and hold on cause Ms. Clause is about to kick Santa outta the house for just one night.

And on that night, all of us adults will watch the dark skies, even knowing the facts of life as the adults that we are, but we will still stare up and remember the innocent excitements of our childhoods. We will recall the dreams of what was possibly coming our way from the Sears catalog that we’d poured through for weeks. We want to somehow gift our children and their children, that same excitement now in our lives.

We want them, and us, and all of the people that we know and love in this quick life to look upward and for just a moment that night, to pause

And all of us together will be children again and…

Believe.

That’s the best that I can tell about it!

Mark & Sharon

Merry Christmas 2024!