Holidaze
I can’t believe how fast the holidays are coming up. Is it really possible that Thanksgiving is coming up next week? For the first time in my life, I’m going to be cooking the Thanksgiving meal. I’m actually looking forward to it; I like to cook, but don’t do it much these days because of time constraints. I just wish we didn’t have quite so much cleaning to do before the house was in a condition to receive guests. But cooking and cleaning both are preferable to facing the NJ Turnpike Thanksgiving week.
Hanukah comes really early this year. (The Jewish holidays operate on a lunar calendar, which means that they move back and forth in the solar calendar — next year Hanukah won’t start until December 25, and there’s one year coming up when it doesn’t fall until January.) This means I have to get my act together soon, but also that the rest of December will be relatively low-stress. I bought a ticket today from one of my coworkers for an opportunity to do after-hours shopping at a local mall this weekend. It supports NOVAM, which is a good cause, and if I can get all my shopping wrapped up, I’ll be thrilled. Plus, I’d like to get myself some clothes before my annual "no setting foot in a mall between Thanksgiving and New Years" resolution takes effect.
The early Hanukah also spreads the orgy of gift-giving out a bit, as my in-laws will still give us Christmas presents. It’s lots of fun to shop for my older son, as he’s at the age when he’s absolutely thrilled by anything you wrap up, whether it’s a t-shirt, a book, or a toy. I have no idea what to get for the baby, who doesn’t need anything, but his brother will be horrified if he doesn’t have something to unwrap too.
I started reading Spin Sisters, by Myrna Blyth, last week, thinking it would be one of my Tuesday book reviews. It’s not going to be, because I feel a moral compulsion to actually read all the books I review; it’s sufficiently poorly written and repetitive that I’m not willing to slog all the way through it. The funny thing is that, in spite of the gratuitous slaps at liberalism, I agree with Blyth’s thesis that the main goal of most "women’s magazines" is to make their advertisers happy. She’s got some zingers about the concept of stress — especially the kind of stress that isn’t caused by major external events like illness or job loss, but just by overextension to too many activities and/or feeling like you need to live up to an unattainable standard (think Martha Stewart). She does raise an interesting question about cause and effect — do people feel more stressed about the holidays now that it’s the conventional wisdom that they’re stressful?
My favorite anti-holiday stress book is Unplug the Christmas Machine, by Jo Robinson (and no, you don’t have to celebrate Christmas to find it useful). It’s not terribly complicated, but it talks you step by step through the process of figuring out what parts of the holiday experience are really important to you, and making those the priorities, while letting everything else slide. It’s out of print, but there seem to be plenty of used copies floating around.
November 21st, 2004 at 9:13 pm
We are doing the Thanksgiving meal for the first time this year too. My husband is cooking (and people are bringing stuff) and I am doing the baking. Enjoy yours — it’s fun to be the host!
November 22nd, 2004 at 8:41 pm
We’re having another family over for the first time, and it’ll be the first time we host a “children’s table”, too.
Since I’m Jewish too, and from a mostly-Orthodox family that doesn’t go big on Chanukah presents (“It’s not a Jewish Christmas!”) I wasn’t exposed to the present-orgy business until I had an American-nonreligious-Christian boyfriend and went to his family’s Christmases. Huge fun for the first few years; now I don’t want to do it anymore. Especially not with my husband’s parents, who haven’t saved for retirement and can’t afford to blow piles of dough on stuff nobody needs and nobody would miss. But we’re fighting the deep Wasp sentiment of “heirloom means I love you and, thank God, relieves me of the burden of saying it,” so I suspect we’re not going to be all that successful in the end.
I was just at B&N, btw, and saw that the guy who wrote _The Millionaire Next Door_ has a companion book out: _The Millionaire Woman Next Door_. (“Woman” is in cursive girly type, natch.) So I took a look to see how these millionaire women manage to navigate the childrearing business. If that’s covered in the book, it’s got no index entry; there’s five pages on grown children trying to scam their rich mothers, and a stat about 81% of the women in his study having 1 or more children, but nothing about how those kids and mothers make it. Curious oversight.