Thanks and Giving

I’m sitting at my kitchen table, the smells of fresh bread permeating the air. Nearby are sleeping dogs and a happy family. In a bit, we’ll drive over the river and through the woods to one of the grandmother’s houses (my sister’s MIL). We will have plenty to eat today, plenty to laugh about, plenty to share. This weekend will bring the Florida-Florida State game, Wicked’s Chex Mix, my Daddy, dinner with my sisters, and a meal with the men at the Fresh Start ministry downtown. If we’re lucky, we’ll also have some quiet time and even a nap.

Back in the 1950s, my aunt brought a special Thanksgiving blessing home from school. My grandfather liked it so much, he adapted it for everyday use. Here’s to blessings, both spoken and experienced.

For all thy gifts so good and fair,

Bestowed so freely everywhere,

Give us grateful hearts, we pray,

To thank thee this Thanksgiving Day.

Amen!

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I'm a Mean One

Unless you grew up under a rock, you recognize this image from the incomparable How the Grinch Stole Christmas holiday special, characters by the inimitable Dr. Seuss, animation and direction by the peerless Chuck Jones. I am totally feeling the Grinch as he stares balefully down on Whoville right now.

I’m sitting in a Starbucks and getting blasted by Christmas music. Note the date above. We haven’t even, to quote the Coneheads, “consumed mass quantities.” No turkey coma. No football immersion. No Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (best moment from the past few years: Cartoon Network Rickrolling the entire parade with the actual Rick Astley). It’s actually just a normal Saturday, but I’m being forced to endure the twin atrocities of Elvis Presley’s “Blue Christmas” and “The Little Drummer Boy.” Ho ho ho my fanny.

Let us just state for the record that we at Chez mimi are not anti-Christmas. We can get downright jovial. But we know how to focus on the season properly, which usually entails buying a tree later so it lasts through Epiphany and attending church throughout Advent, not just swooping in for an annual hit-and-run at the Christmas Eve service, with a followup on Easter Sunday.

What’s provoking this spew of Grinchlike bile? The incessant holiday creep that invades earlier and earlier each year. Starbucks is actually showing amazing restraint by holding off on the holiday music this long. Walmart has had trees and decorations available since just after Labor Day, for Pete’s sake--yet another reason they’re at the absolute bottom of my shopping pile. When you start thinking of praising a retailer for restraint for holding off on the mistletoe until the day after Halloween, something is seriously skewed.

That’s why I’m a big fan of Nordstrom. If I were aspirational in the income department, I’d shop there all the time just as a thank you for their no-Christmas-decorations-until-after-Thanksgiving policy. (Check out a news story about it here.) It’s just too bad that they have to post signs about the policy because people have become so inured to the shopping season stupidity.

It’s gotten so bad that KellyKellyKellyKelly, one of my oldest and dearest friends who happens to work for a major retail chain, told me that the mall where her store is located has demanded that all stores open at midnight on Black Friday. Frickin’ MIDNIGHT. If you’ve ever worked in retail, you know that a midnight opening means someone has to be there earlier, so that means lots of employees cutting their Thanksgiving Day short so they can allow denuded buttheads the ability to worship at the altar of consumerism RIGHT AWAY.

People, the stores aren’t going anywhere. If part of your holiday spirit involves going to a mall in the dark of night to grab bargains and elbow it out with rude, impatient people, then be my guest. I’ll be tucked in my bed. Visions of sugarplums optional.

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Snowed Under

I wish I could claim actual snow--that would be interesting and fun--but alas, no. The blizzard I’m facing is the end-of-term stack of paperwork. Grades are due Wednesday, so I’m full up with whining children who complain about bad grades (usually due to missing assignments) and grovel for makeup work. As I like to tell them, “There’s not enough extra credit in the world to make up for credit credit you didn’t bother to get in the first place.”

I’d feel sorrier for them if a more hard-line stance didn’t help. Just today, I got a Facebook post from a former student. She’s adjusting well to school and has an A in her college English class thanks to her “mean” teacher. It came at exactly the right time.

Now, an evening with friends, and a weekend of grading. Reality bites.

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The Bed List

Took Frack and a passel of her friends to the movies today to see Captain America: The First Avenger. May I just say that Chris Evans is one red, white, and blue hunk of YUM? More, please. Preferably before they release The Avengersnext summer.

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Readin' and Writin'

One thing about summer that I love is the time to catch up on reading. During the school year, most of the reading I’m doing is either keeping up with (or ahead of) my students, which often crowds out any meaningful time to read what I want to read. As a result, I’m usually woefully behind on the new hot books. It takes me forever to get to the old hot books—for instance, I just finally read Water for Elephants. I waited until Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire before I took myself to Hogwarts the first time. I’m like the person in the world to read The Help. And don’t even get me started on the books I’m allegedly supposed to read, the award winners and lauded tomes like Freedom and The Pale Kingand the international sensations like Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. Don’t know the girl with the dragon tattoo except what I’ve read in newspapers and such, but I’ll get around to her sometime. But not this week. I have a stack of YA I picked up at RWA National that’s going to migrate to my classroom, and I’d like to be able to talk them up when they get there.

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Downsizing

Four pounds doesn't seem like much when you're hefting it in the grocery store. Heft that thing in a travel bag through a bunch of airports (Atlanta's being a standout problem), up and down elevators and across pedestrian bridges in hotels, it gains mass the way most of us do during Christmas cookie time. Four pounds of laptop over your shoulder starts carving a groove in said shoulder, let me just say.

A month away from home can teach you a lot of things, like how to find laundromats in strange cities, how expensive it is to buy Dr Peppers from a hotel snack bar, and how—no matter how nicely they make it up or turn it down at night—that pretty hotel bed just isn’t as nice as your own. But the one thing all that traveling really teaches you is how heavy that laptop of yours really is.

All that traveling wasn’t for naught, however. I did get paid. And one thing I did with my check was give my back and shoulders a bit of a break. My new MacBook Air just arrived this morning. Two pounds and a teeny bit of change. The screen’s smaller—it’s the eleven-inch model—but I think the weight loss will compensate for it. Especially in the Atlanta airport, which all folks from the South are doomed to roam whether they want to or not.

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Just a Few Notes...

Revision time! My notes arrived from Dream Agent (Longest. Email. Ever.), so now I need to revise. Which is fine. I like revising. Really! The notes themselves aren’t that awful. Fixes here and there that several sets of sharp eyes managed to catch. Validation of nagging worries that I tried to ignore, but which kept creeping in. A roadmap for some progress. Little things. Really! Not at all like dynamiting and starting over. Even if it feels like it.

Okay. Enough whining. Back to work, since nothing else will do the trick.

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