Still waiting...

It hasn't hit me yet. The Christmas spirit that is.

In the past few years I've just been a slow starter, a man going through the motions of preparing and doing this and that until one day it hits me. Until then it's just business, a kind of detached working through task upon task while the clock ticks away.

Now it's hard to say what will be the trigger this year. Sometimes its a song. Other times its something I see. Once in a while I will be just sitting there by myself and it arrives. Who knows? But one thing is certain. Right now there is nothing, like someone from Mars seeing everything for the first time and not having a clue as to what's happening and no particular curiousity about it at all.

The truth is right now I mostly want everything to get done and over with and the sooner the better. My day will be December 26th, the Feast of the Most Tranquil Sleep, when all that lies between me and my happiness is a pillow. That all being said it should be noted that I'm not some Scrooge with a primordial loathing of this time. I'm really a guy for whom this time is mostly about work and a kind of exhaustion based game of chicken with December 25th. The magic and holiness and grace of this time has not left but finds, over the years, more clever places to hide with a correspondingly harder task of seeking. Right now not even Nat King Cole's Christmas CD, usually a fairly effective unearther of the holiday spirit, works.

It'll come, though, maybe only when I'm driving back from LaCrosse on Christmas morning. Maybe sooner. I don't know. Until then I'll just work and wait.