Christmas Crunch

One thing that comes with traveling for the holidays is an earlier deadline to get 'things' done.

There is no last minute shopping... well, there is, but it's two weeks out from Christmas. Everything has to be shipped out a week beforehand to be 'guaranteed' for Christmas Delivery (though FedEx rocks on that department - Ground Delivery=2-Day Delivery to FL!). But the crunch on the gifts somehow causes a crunch on everything else, because the shipping of the boxes becomes the priority. They suddenly need to come before the cards, and sometimes even before the decorating.

And that I can't do. I simply cannot wrap gifts if the tree is not at least up. For as long as I can remember, I wrap by tree light. Well, other lights might be on, too, but the key is that the tree is up and decorated.

So this year... we seemingly had an extra week between Thanksgiving and Christmas, but that week somehow disappeared on me. Like, seriously unaccounted for. I have no idea what I was doing that I lost that week. I know I took an extended weekend for a cruise... but I've been here every other weekend. So how was I feeling the stress of getting it all done??

At the end of it all, I barely got my packages out... literally shipped them on Monday. Which impacted my cards, which I just finished... right now... at 1am. All 78 of them. When did my Christmas card list get so big?? I'm not complaining - I love that I can at least has some personal, non-Facebook contact that one time of year. Scary part is I feel like I forgot some one/people... I think I keep good track of my list, but I just have that instinctive feeling. Maybe it's just because I'm lacking sleep.

Anyway... at this point, I'm done. All that's left that's even remotely stressful would be the actual traveling. Which, for me, is not stressful. Except for the night before... For as much as I travel, I still manage to get trip anxiety before every trip, and packing for me as quite the process because of it. Oh well. I'll deal with that when the time comes. For now, I just get to enjoy sitting by my tree.

12/20/12 - 2pm
P.S. Yup... I missed some people. Already added two more within 12hrs of writing this...