The Christmas Countdown

I know I'm not alone here (right, Nancy!?) when I say...enough with the countdowns. I'm tired of hearing "Are you done with your Christmas shopping? Did you get your cards out yet? What are your plans for winter break?" and "Only a few more days to get it all done!" Every time I see a festive sweater or hear yet another version of Rudolph or the words "Doorbuster, Santariffic" or "Wrap the Holidays in Fun," it doesn't make me want to go a'caroling or a'wassailing or a'shopping. It does, however, put me in the mood to go a'drinking and a'swearing while I a'watch a little a'football.

The good news is that yes, I am done with the shopping, the wrapping, the mailing and, despite wanting to skip this year, I even sent out Christmas cards. The fake tree is decorated, the Santa gifts are hidden and each kid has a bag of crap that's just waiting to be jammed into their always-too-small stocking. But, sadly, I'm not done. Not even close.

According to my calendar, what I've been told, and what I overheard while eavesdropping on those two women at Target, these are a few of the statistics:

• There is one week left until Christmas.
• Two weeks left until we say adios to 2010.
• Three school days before winter break.
• Or for some kids, zero days until winter break.
• Three trips to the grocery store that need to be made.
• Actually, it's six trips if you count the two different stores because it wouldn't make sense for one store to carry everything that I need.
• Two trips to the liquor store.
• Or, for the insane, zero trips to the liquor store.
• Or, if you're me, five trips.
• $250 of express shipping fees that someone (but not me) needs to spend because a couple out-of-town recipients were "forgotten."
• $0 of shipping fees because I paid attention when I got an email that said "Perfect gift for the mother-in-law" and "FREE SHIPPING!"
• Twenty dozen cookies that will be baked in the next 36 hours.
• Which sounds almost as nauseating as saying "three pounds of butter."
• Seven days left to play the Santa card.
• Eight gifts that "might" be returned to the store before Christmas if someone doesn't change their attitude NOW!
• Two parents that had the nerve to plan a kid's birthday party the week before Christmas.
• One more choir concert to get through.
• One piano recital to get through. And oh how I hope that woman that has a Bump-It permanently implanted in her skull sits in front of me again.
• Two more tennis lessons. Oh, and two tournaments before 2011.
• Four more trips to the junior high, which will bring the number of trips in one week to a grand total of Ee-Lev-En.
• Three bags of ice that I'm planning on purchasing in the next week.
• Four bags if things go well.
• Six bags if things go really well.
• Oh wait, I forgot about New Year's weekend. So then, let's just say a lot of bags of ice.
• Two classes that a kid missed last Friday, but it's okay because it was a planned absence and I was assured that the kid had everything turned in.
• Four things that weren't turned in, completed, accounted for or were just forgotten about.
• Ten minutes that I yelled about those four things.
• Four limbs on a kid that resembled a dried up reptile because, after all, there are only three different things of lotion in the bathroom to choose from so how could I be so unrealistic as to expect the lotion to actually be applied to the scaly skin?
• Really, though, how could I expect him to use lotion? After all, I've only reminded him 472 times.
• Three times within fifteen minutes that I said "You need to get up at 6."
• Which explains why, within one minute, a kid asked "So what time should I get up?"
• Ten minutes that I yelled about that.
• Twelve minutes that I wasted, standing in line at the self-service kiosk at the post office, waiting for the technologically retarded (I know that term isn't politically correct, but I think that in this case she was sort of retarded) woman to figure out how to ship a manila envelope to St. Louis and also purchase one sheet of Forever stamps, all within one transaction. She failed. Miserably. Instead of one transaction, it was actually more like seven. Seriously. The machine would not stop beeping at her.
• Zero inches of snow in the weather forecast for the next two weeks. You hear that, bitch-face Mother Nature? I want ZERO!
• Six scaly spots on Zoe's face that need to heal so that people can stop asking me "What's on her face? What's wrong with your daughter? Does she have the chicken pox?" and I have to repeatedly say: No, she doesn't have a disease. It's because they had Clifford (you know, the big red sweetly retarded {sorry} dog) day at school a few days ago and they used face paint to put these black dots on my kid's face. But unfortunately they used some funky face paint that contained arsenic and lye and cyanide and was probably made in Tanzania and had been recalled in 1983, which left these angry red spots on my daughter's cheeks. No, she doesn't have chicken pox because even though I'm anal and organized, I don't have the power to make sure that chicken-pox-induced red sores appear perfectly symmetrical and in only one highly visible location. And if you think the spots look freaky now, you should have seen her right after I washed the face paint off:

Oh, and yesterday she got a haircut and her bangs are so cute. But they're really short which, for some reason, accentuates the fact that there is also a scaly spot on the end of her nose. Cuz, ya know, Clifford's nose is black.

Now, where is that first bag of ice?