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Walking Around in a Daze These Days

   Written by on December 18, 2015 at 11:44 am

logo - walk in gardenAn interesting article caught my attention the other day, posing the question of why the holiday season turns most women into 1950s housewives. Think about it. Women who never pick up a glue bottle all year are suddenly gluing and glittering and stamping everything in sight to be able to put their own handmade tags on gifts and place cards on the dining room table. Read on…

Costumes for the Christmas play at school or church absolutely must be homemade. No store-bought shepherds here. And it always takes a couple of nights of after midnight sewing to get the angel’s wings and halo just right.

Decorating? Just don’t get in the way of these women who dash around the house like dervishes adorning everything that doesn’t move out of their path. Mantels must have fresh greens, banisters must have perfectly draped garland, and every door must have a wreath (even the bathroom!).

Red and green tapers that haven’t seen the light of day since last year stand proudly (and mostly unlit) in the midst of more pine and holly, on every flat surface.

And how many little clear lights can one house support? Over the doors, around the windows, strung through the shrubs and across the yard – all placement supervised by Super Woman.

These, incidentally, are the same women who shop diligently for sales on frozen entrees during the year to feed her family. Yet, come December, they’re up to their elbows in butter cream, cookie dough and peppermint crumbs. They’ll drive to who knows how many grocery stores to get that one special ingredient for a Christmas dinner recipe they saw on Pioneer Woman and just must prepare for guests, or they might as well cancel the whole thing.

And what about all that shopping? We’re talking marathon here; from shortly after Halloween till everybody on the list is getting just the right thing, these women shop literally till they drop. Oh, and only at sales.

Cooking, cleaning, decorating, addressing cards, shopping, and wrapping, to say nothing of coordinating the schedules of everybody in the household so they make it to all the plays and caroling events.

Okay, enough. Where is the husband while his wife is running herself ragged and everybody else crazy? Oh, that’s him over there with a dozen strings of tree lights scattered all over the living room floor so he can “test them.” That done, he disappears, back to his recliner, keeping the remote from getting lost in the holiday clutter. He takes the dog out occasionally, throws a log on the fire Christmas morning and, thank goodness, mixes the wife a good “attitude adjuster” late in the afternoons. That is, if she can hold a drink in one hand and paint glitter on a pine cone with the other.

Well, it will all be over soon. She can go back to her normal housekeeping, shopping, cleaning, cooking, laundry, carpooling, full time job, picking the kids up from practice, taking the kids to ball games, making all the doctor appointments, and on and on.

And Dad? Oh, he’s outside with the dog again. Smart man.

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