annual holiday pep talk. DO THE THING.

It is very nearly inevitable that, eventually, life will crap on your sense of holiday magic. I'm lucky to have made it all the way to adulthood before a spectacularly awful Christmas with the in-laws dropped that particular heap of shit on my warm-fuzzies back in 2003. Maybe some people manage to nurture the fragile blossom of wonder deep into their lives and then conveniently die before any grim life event can slap it from their hearts, but then they've gone and snuffed the joy for everyone else who loved them dearly, so GOOD JOB.

Adulthood renders toy companions into lumps of plastic and fairy lights into electric bills, and you learn pretty quickly that if the holidays are to have any chance of surviving to the next generation, you have to fight back. It won't mean you'll feel the thing again, but it's better than being a miserable old asshole.

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT, I tell myself every year. And it's worked, because my kids dance with excitement and tell stories about magical Christmases Past that I can barely recognize from where I'm standing with my oven mitts tugged on like boxing gloves. There were divorces and deaths and layoffs and illnesses that I've had to run ahead and kick out of the way and bury under tinsel and drown in eggnog, flicking cookies like ninja stars  - and IT WORKED. The kids are whole and shiny. These are the good old days, this is the payoff, and I will take it and eat it and wash it down with hot buttered rum, because this is the point of the whole thing. Existence is too big and important and incredible to get run flat by grubby human bullshit. You get to be here, to be part of it. Make that shit happen. Grab it and throttle some joy out of it even if that joy is real instead of magical. So nobody stuffs my stocking or remembers to buy me Santa presents? I will cram a whole bottle of St. Germain's into that sock and buy myself all the yarn I want and knit while swigging booze at 6am on Christmas, and SO THERE. That is how you do this thing.

This year we vaulted a cancer diagnosis ('pre-cancer'? I win for another year!). We skidded around animal heartbreak (Xebo died, but he was 20 years old and OH LOOK WE FOUND A KITTEN). We avoided hospital visits (caught the toddler's head with my goddamn FOOT on two occasions). You can't dodge everything - my mother lost an internal organ, the childcare budget flared up and consumed the grocery budget, and last night I broke the cartilage in my nose when I accidentally headbutted a flying cat - but WE FIGHT.

6 weeks left. Get to it.