Reflecting on the Season

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December 2005 Durham, NC
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See, here's the thing about Christmas.

I grew up watching way too much television, a fact that has warped a great deal of my thinking for far too many years. One of those ways has to do with my expectations of Christmas. The big tree, the lights, the clean house, the cookies and cakes everywhere, a nice fire in the fireplace and, of course, standing by the window looking at all of the snow piling up against the panes and covering the grass and driveways outside.

That's one of the signals that Christmas is really on it's way.

Instead, Real Life is nothing like that. We have about 10 days before Christmas and none of those idealized trappings exist for me yet. Worse, I have to be the one to help create some of them. What happened to those frisky little pixies ("Yeeeeeaaaaassss!!!") that play their magical flutes in Scottish castle hotels, cleaned the Huxtable family's house all through "The Cosby Show" years and, undoubtedly, cleaned, cooked and created through all of the TV Christmas Specials that I watched as a kid.

Geez, do I have to do everything around here?

(Bonn would, undoubtedly, take this opportunity to smack me upside the head and correct me by saying, "No, I have to do everything around here.")

(And she has a point)

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