A Sleigh Full of Prozac

Not that I’m startled. It’s an annual phenomenon. Like the migration of the swallows to Capistrano. Or jock itch.

The pages on the calendar turn, over my protests and despite my perpetually being at least one holiday behind. (Pink sugar-coated heart-shaped cookies make EXCELLENT 4^th of July snacks, by the way. Shut up.) And before we know it, October is here, and with it, the celebration-confused retail displays of fake Jack-O-Lanterns and mutantly proportioned front-porch-Santas.

And with the taking down of the fake spiders and the eating of the last candy-corn, my sanity slips quietly out the nearest drafty heater vent.

In a display of dichotomous brain-bending  that makes Sybil look like the poster child of equilibrium, I begin my pathological pendulum swing back and forth between The Diva of Drama and Denial and Manic-Martha-Stewart.

November 1st: It can’t be the holiday season. It CAN’T be. I haven’t even signed the back-to-school papers yet.

November 2nd: Ooh, look! Red and green Hershey’s kisses!

November 3rd: I am NOT buying ANYTHING yet!

November 4th: I MUST have these light-up reindeer potholders!

November 5th: I can’t stand people. We are locking the doors until Groundhog Day.

November 6th: Look at this recipe for cheese puffs! Let’s have a dinner party for 12.

November 7th: If anyone sings a carol to me, I am going to strangle them with their own scarf.

November 8th: “Nine maids a-layin’, eight lords a-lookin’…”

November 9^th:  I’m too busy to bake for the neighbors this year.

November 10^th: Maybe we could do these six types of cookies?

November 11^th: We’re NOT going to drink as much this year.

November 12^th: SALE AT BEVMO!!!

Somewhere after Thanksgiving, I begin to panic when I realize that December is in, like, sixteen hours, and I haven’t even located the decorations under the layers of sports equipment, car parts, discarded area rugs and abandoned Amazon boxes in the garage. I know they’re in there somewhere, but then, I also know that there’s a country in the mid-East called Kazakhstan, but that doesn’t mean I could find it on a map.

While I tell myself that I am a busy woman with a full-time job, a side business, three kids and that the only expectations that lay upon me are the ones I impose myself, I also know that everyone is judging me based on the gingerbreadiness of my house and sparkliness of my tinsel.

And yes, it is possible to hold both those truths in my head at the same time. Flight patterns for O’Hare Airport have NOTHING on my tangled cognitive process.

Seriously, they don’t make an antipsychotic strong enough to cope with me.