Holiday spirit

Two more days of Chanukah, two weeks until Christmas.

I hung wreaths and stockings with a morose air.  The house pressed on me, tight and cluttered with the boxes of holiday decorations piled in the hall, pictures pulled down and stacked in a corner to make way for seasonal hangings and our usual stacks pushed to the side for relocating.  Maybe I felt internally cluttered with lists and things clamoring for attention. Bake the challah for three preschools, decorate, finish the cards, check off present lists, no new pajamas yet for Christmas Eve, the menorah unlit during my travels, touched lightly.  The last night, I promised, we'll do it the last night. As if that left me so much time.  It's tomorrow.

On my constant runs up and down the basement steps, laundry, store the stacks, take down the empty decorations boxes, grab the flour, start the dough, I glimpsed Quinn through the door of the play room.  He sat in the middle of a large arc of stuffed animals to which he gave careful, lisped instructions in his Quinn voice.  "These are my babies," he told me as I huffed by.  "They're sitting in sool, like Saige and Darrett."  Ten minutes later, another fly by. "Momma?  Quiet time too long."

I carried the pictures removed from the mantel and the wall upstairs.  Nate cried in the nursery and I winced.  The dough wasn't finished, three boxes of ornaments lay enticingly open in the hall, Quinn clamored to be allowed upstairs, only an hour until Kindergarten pick up.  The baby screamed through his diaper change. My shoulders set in a harried hunch.

It's so much work with children hanging off of me and little hands into everything I don't place high enough and shrill voices howling at me for daring to take my attention away for an hour or two.  Why do I do it?  Why do I sign up for all the extras?

"Mooommmmaaaaaa.  Quiet time TOO.  LONG.  I want to come UP."

"Okay," I called to him, the howling, snotty-nosed baby on my hip, the metal and unrisen dough taste of defeat on my tongue, "come up here and play."

Quinn stomped up the steps and through the kitchen.  I handed the baby a cracker. Silence.

He was stopped a few steps into the living room, a wide-eyed cliche in his wonder, his little hands on either side of his face in a perfect Home Alone parody.  He gazed at the fireplace, the huge wreath hung above, the stockings.  "Oh," he gasped, "it's bootiful."

Oh yeah.  That's why. 

Here's a toast to all of us, the parents everywhere, the friends and volunteers, working themselves into a holiday tizzy.  May we all have little moments to remind us that it's bootiful.  Even if we had to make it that way our damn selves.  Magic is still magic from behind the curtain.



I'm leaving comments open because I love Gayle so.  But I want you to know that my inability to respond and my reading-blogs behindness is adding to my general panic. As always, I treasure every little thing you tell me.