Happy Festivus!

And Merry Christmas and all that.

It's pretty clear that the holidays make people (ok, mostly adults) insane. A friend says that the whole point of the holidays is that they're for the kids, and that more or less the grown-ups have to deal. But my family, aside from a couple cousins, doesn't have kids involved. Yet we still drive ourselves and each other CRAZY.

We procrastinate buying gifts, we spend WAAAAY more than we have/than we intended, we stress over the perfect decorations, we willfully battle gridlocked mall parking lots, and we volunteer/bring upon ourselves to cook or prepare far too many dishes.

I fall into almost all of those categories, most notably the last (except for the malls, I'm an online shopaholic). Every holiday I offer to cook or bring some sort of dish and I turn it into far more complicated of an affair than it ever should have been. Additionally, I greatly dislike cooking, and nor am I particularly good at it. Are we all just masochists around the holidays?

I hope that maybe deep within our mildly demented hearts and minds that the real reason for driving ourselves and families nuts is not just "for the kids" but really for each other. To show the people in our lives that we actually do care even though we've been screaming at them for the past week, or biting their heads off, or were just plain crabby since the day after thanksgiving.

And I hope that everyone can see that in spite of all the mass commercialized glut, the 80 million tins of cookies, the late night gift wrapping, the stress of the family parties, et al, that we are all pretty damn lucky to have so many people in our lives who DO care about us and who just want to make us feel happy and loved. We should let them, and we should make sure they know we want them to be happy and loved, too. Because everyone, not just the kids, needs to know that.

I love you all! And happy holidays :)