You are sitting on your couch, folding towels and watching TV. All the commercials are advertising last-minute gift ideas. You've only checked off maybe half of your list, yet you continue to do laundry and watch TV convincing yourself that the commercials are for the unorganized.
Somebody tells you the date and you are shocked. Because yesterday was the day before and you had all kinds of time yesterday.
You place a batch of Christmas cookies in the freezer and tell yourself, ‘enough baking already’. You put the cookie sheets away, but something is hindering the progress of you sliding them into the cupboard. You leave them sticking half way out, reasoning with yourself that eventually after digging around for something else you will dislodge said item and the cookie sheets will fit in the cupboard like they once did.
You have three places to be in three days all of which you are taking an assigned dish. You quickly realize you probably should have written them down. The third day and this is the big day, Christmas, you have three assigned dishes. Three. Some kind of Jello, green bean casserole and the third one will come to you after you have left the grocery store. You also decide to make that cranberry relish everyone liked when you made it a couple years ago. You talk your daughter-in-law into making the Jello because the cranberry relish is rather involved. You have to chop 12 ounces of cranberries because seven years ago your food processor died and you never replaced it, you just don’t have the counter space. You also have to chop two apples and try not to forget the cup and a half of walnuts.
You decide to kick the cookie sheets into the cupboard because you could use some new ones anyway.
There is not one gift wrapped and under your tree, in fact you don’t even know if you have wrapping paper. And if you do you won’t be able to wrap because your hands hurt from chopping cranberries.
You have no idea what to wear but that’s okay because your husband says you have a closet full of clothes.
For some reason unforeseen you believe you can sit down at the computer and play just one game of Solitaire, it turns out you can’t. You play twenty-seven games and forget to make dinner.
Upon closer inspection your roots aren’t as bad as you thought and there is always that Santa hat you were going to make the dog wear.
If you should find yourself in a few of these situations, you are so screwed and dare I say ‘yes you are stressed out’ get a grip. You should have been making plans in November. Don’t let this happen again next year.
