With the Christmas chaos that is.  This time of year requires strength, stamina and fortitude.  Pretty much equal to running a marathon.  Marathons have an official distance of 42.195 kms (26 miles and 385 yards, bizarrely, neither number is rounded), I bet that is how much mileage people put on their feet doing their Christmas shopping.  People train for years to run a marathon.  Some do it only once, but others do it religiously every year, sometimes running several in one year.

Can you imagine going through all the hoopla and hullabaloo of Christmas multiple times in a year?  Call me a Grinch, but I would rather poke my eyes out than go through this more than once a year.

The To-Do lists seem never-ending.  Baking, shopping, wrapping, cleaning, cooking, decorating, smiling, planning, partying, hosting, visiting, etc.

It’s enough to turn the most diehard Christmas fan into a Scrooge.

We start off the Holiday season grinning stupidly with visions of sugarplum perfection dancing in our heads.  By the end of the Holidays, we are bloated with food, sugar and booze, eyes puffy and ringed from lack of sleep trying to figure out a way of explaining to your boss the need to wear stretchy pajama pants to work come January 2nd.  All in the name of the Christmas Season.

There is still lots to be done in my household, mainly food related (cookie baking day is today with my daughter, which is one of the days I cherish the most this time of the year), putting a tree up and preparing for our annual Christmas Eve Open House dinner and Christmas morning brunch.  But I am feeling less harried now that the shopping is out of the way.  This is what drives me around the bend the most.  The clogged roads on the way to the mall, the clogged parking lots at the malls, the clogged stores IN the malls.  The moody shoppers pushing and shoving to get that last prized hugging Elmo.

I will now spend the next 2 weeks locked in the kitchen, which is a fate I much prefer over being banished to an over-crowded mall any day.

My advice to all of you?  If you can move to a teeny, tiny island for the month of December thus escaping the pressures of the Holidays – DO IT!

If not….well, your stuck like the rest of us….may as well grab a beer and drown out the jingle bells.