Christmas is coming????

Let us enjoy Thanksgiving already, hello!!! Christmas music has begun on the radios, the stores are full of Christmas candy and wrapping paper, and other annoying accountrements of the season. And someone who shall remain nameless called me this morning to say she's decorating her tree. Now I don't mind what you do in your own home. I mean, you can keep your lights on all year if you want, but don't ram it down my throat at the stores yet. Because here's the thing. I LOVE Christmas. Because it's special and holy and precious and ONLY AT A CERTAIN TIME OF YEAR. If it were all year or, say, from September on (CVS, I'm talking to you), it wouldn't be as special, now would it? At any rate, the Christmas catalogs are dropped through my front door every day, and they're gorgeous. Hard to believe the economy is so bad when I get the catalogs that look like they cost $10 a piece to print.

Okay, glad we got that out of the way. I've been writing like a feind, so not much reading time these past couple of weeks, but I hope to finish my new novel (rough draft anyway) the end of this week or the beginning of next, so I'll be reading again. And getting ready for the tour.

Okay, I'm taking enthusiastic volunteers to help decorate for the tour. Just let me know because I'd LOVE all the help I can get. Even if you can just give me an hour one day the second week in December, that would be awesome. OR if you have fantastic foliage in your yard, like cedar or holly, that I could rape and pillage, that would be good, too.

So here's the thing about being on the tour, you've got to get all your normal crap out, so you can decorate. The 'normal crap' is the stuff we use every day to LIVE, so this is tricky. So I'm trying to live with less stuff all over my counters (sorry, that's just not my learning style, people), so I can have space to decorate (which is essentially just more stuff that someone,somewhere decided looked better than my stacks of manuscripts, rejection letters, school papers, newspapers, bills to pay, yearbook order forms, acolyte schedules, EYC schedules, school menus, spelling words, tests with 100 on them, rare and precious recipes, and so on. So that's what I'm doing. Sound fun? I found some thank you notes my son wrote after his birthday in September but never made it to the mailbox. Oops.

Here's my goal for this Christmas: Peace on Earth. I know, I know, I can't single-handedly orchestrate peace on earth, but I can start with me. Peace on my little space of the Earth. Because I know that's what God wants our Christmas to be, love and peace and family time and all the things He is about. I think about the total peace of holding a sweet little baby, like Mary once held Jesus, like we all held our bambinos, and that's the feeling, that's the goal, that's the place we want to be. Not wielding catalogs and huge shopping bags (although sometimes these things are necessary), but wielding smiles and open arms and giving spirits. So if Christmas is going to come early, make it this kind of Christmas. The peace on earth variety. That starts with me. Just think if we all made that our goal. It would be joy to the world, indeed. And CVS, I wouldn't mind if you got that kind of Christmas going in September. Not at all.

P.S. I think there's a little It's a Small World juice still running through my veins from last week.