The bulk of the day today was spent at Richard’s parents’ house, doing the traditional decorating of the tree. Prior to that we had haircut appointments in Woodland. All of this meant that we left our house in Sacramento at about 10:30 and did not get back until twelve hours later. And yet I still managed to squeeze in enough time this morning to unpack all the remaining boxes in the downstairs guest room, one more box of random kitchen stuff, find a small handful of shelf pegs that will actually fit the tall, skinny shelf in the computer room which thus enabled me to unpack all my piano music, and give the downstairs bathroom a thorough scrub. The bathroom cleaning was no small task, if only because someone (Checkers, I am looking at you) has lately decided that the very best spot to launch from when in the middle of her latest ‘binge and purge’ session, is on top of the bathroom counter. Let’s just say that dried on cat hork is ‘fun’ to have to scrub off the front of cabinet doors, and leave it at that, shall we? We also had time to sort out all the stocking stuffers for Richard’s side of the family, and wrap every single one of them. The plan had been to take the bag of gifts that needed to be mailed with us, but we ended up not going home in between haircuts and leaving for the in-laws, so mailing will have to wait until Monday.

The afternoon and evening down at the in-laws was nice. When we arrived, his oldest sister was there, so we all got a chance to talk and catch up – a nice surprise, as we don’t get to see her very often (that pesky thing called life tends to get in the way – heh). Decorating the tree went rather quickly, probably because we have this all down to a science – I crawl into the back corner and occasionally someone hands me a pile of ornaments, and Richard and his youngest sister and his mom decorate the front, and when all the ornaments (and they have a *lot* of ornaments) are on the tree, his dad then does his part – draping the entire thing with strands of sparkly silver beads. It always looks so pretty when it’s done, with all the lights and the sparkle of the ornaments, and it reminded us yet again, that even though our tree has been standing now for a week, we have not put a single ornament on ours yet, and most of the time, we forget to even turn the lights on.

On the drive home this evening I got to thinking about this, and I think the problem is that this year, it’s been harder to get into that Christmas mood, because I’ve been spending too much time focused on everything else that needs to get done, related to the move and the new house and the never-ending issue of ‘we cannot unpack this until we know where to put it, except we don’t know where to put it because we do not have the appropriate item of storage/furniture/whatever’. Decorating for Christmas means putting it all up and then letting myself just sit and relax and enjoy it, but I feel like this year I just haven’t made it to that point yet. I noted to Richard that I have not even done a single bit of baking yet, and usually by now I would have done *something*. Making lemon curd really does not count (although he countered that maybe it should, since we now have a lemon tree and chances are pretty high that jars of homemade lemon curd will likely become standard gifts in the near future).

I’m not sure how to slip gracefully into that whole ‘relax and enjoy it’ feeling for this holiday – at least not yet. The list of things I really want to get done is still too long, and pretending the list doesn’t exist will not make it go away, it will just drive me even more twitchy about it. However, we did jokingly talk about maybe we could each put 5 or 10 ornaments on our tree each day, so that by the time people arrive, it will be done, and Richard is going to put timers on all the lights so even if we keep forgetting to go plug things in, the house will look festive without our help, and tomorrow is a nice long day full of lots of time to accomplish things that maybe, just maybe, could include a teensy bit of baking and relaxing before I launch myself back into a frenzy again.

It helps that when we got home tonight, my little sister’s present was sitting on the front porch, and there was an email from Richard’s aunt saying that the present for his uncle had finally arrived, so that is two things I can now add to the list of things I no longer have to worry about anymore.

Happy Holidailies!