Lately

I’m going to start planning for Christmas 2009 tomorrow.  Instead of spending all fall thinking about getting ready for the holiday only to wake up on the 21st and wonder where all the time has gone, I’m going to flip ahead in my 2009 calendar to September of next year and write ‘to do’ items in as reminders so I can spread the preparation out over three and a half months.

Christmas is a misleading holiday because it doesn’t happen at the very end of the month, but I think a lot of people think of it coming then.  You don’t have all of December to shop and bake and wrap and decorate.  In fact, you don’t even have 25 days because Christmas begins on Christmas Eve, the 24th, and the world as we know it seems to stop in time around four o’clock that afternoon.  I always feel cheated out of the last few daylight hours on Christmas Eve because it’s always then that I remember something that occurred to me on Halloween but has evaded my memory since then.

And speaking of Halloween!  Next year, I promise not to scoff when red and green holiday decor goes up at Target and Pottery Barn before the black and orange stuff comes down.  We all complain that it’s too soon, that retailers are pushing the holidays upon us to pull our dollars out from under us.  We say, “Already?  But Christmas is months away!”  And then we go about our merry ways as though we have outsmarted the advertising industry and the Gregorian calendar (not to mention Baby Jesus).  It’s not months away!  It’s one month and twenty-four days away.  Most people probably need all that time between Halloween and December 24th to get ready.

The one thing I wanted to do in advance that I actually did in advance was to find another Christmas-y short story to share here like I did last year.

And so, I give you A Luckless Santa Claus by F. Scott Fitzgerald, written in 1912 when the author was about sixteen.

Oh, F. Scott.  I love you for hyphenating the word “pro-ceeding.”

Merry Christmas to F. Scott, Zelda, Dorothy and Harry, and merry Christmas to you.

I have to work on Tuesday before I go home for my actual Christmas vacation, but I used the last of my personal days to have myself a merry little staycation of a long weekend.  A vacation calls for “Vacation Cereal,” you know, the kind of breakfast you’re only allowed to eat on special occasions because they aren’t considered ‘brain food.’

I sat down this morning to eat my bowl of Reese’s Puffs and ‘read’ the back of the box.  Remember the days when a breakfast’s worth of word searches and mazes and riddles were provided on the back of the breakfast packaging?

When I saw the back of this particular box, I thought, Isn’t this ironic?  Yeah, I really do think.

At 18, I would have checked off five or six things.  I scored the school newspaper equivalent of the winning goal my senior year in high school.  I’d kept more than one pointless collection and raised money for more than one charity at that age.  I got away with a stellar practical joke at 19 (retaliation is the worst).  At 20, I swung across a canyon, which close enough to bungee jumping to count, I think, and probably as close as I want to come.

I’ve idolized a handful of people, including authors and actors both living and dead, and I’ve met a couple of them.  I’ve made discoveries, literally and metaphorically, though to my knowledge, nothing has been named after me.

A couple of these items don’t make much sense, though.  For one thing, I’ve met plenty of other Emily‘s.  I think there were two others in my pre-school class.  I’ve never met someone who shares my full name and I’ll be just fine if I never do.  That’s more like a bizarre coincidence than a life goal.  Another quandry: 18-year-olds haven’t been licensed drivers for even two years.  In some states, they aren’t even allowed to drive across state lines after dark before they turn 18.  Just when are you supposed to take a road trip from coast to coast?