Adulting Wins to Be Proud Of: Taking Down the Christmas Tree Within a Reasonable Amount of Time

Even though I don’t really celebrate Christmas, I still wind up with a Christmas tree every year because I throw an Ugly Sweater Christmas Party and it wouldn’t be a Christmas party without some festive decorations.

KHAAAAAAAN!

When I was a girl, my grandparents bought real trees, but my mother and I owned an artificial tree that she kept in the attic along with a box of ornaments. Each year we’d put up the artificial tree, decorate it with our beat-up plastic ornaments, and smother it in tinsel, because my mother was no Frank Costanza. Catholics, you may or may not be aware, celebrate Christmas until 6 January, the Epiphany, the day when the Wise Men are said to have finally reached Bethlehem and recognized that Christ was the Son of God. Each year, on Boxing Day, my mother would say, “We can’t take the tree down until January 6.”

And then it would stay up until March.

Christina Majaski once left her Christmas tree up for at least a year, until she had to put it down because it attacked her dog. It even had its own Twitter account and its own Facebook. I hear tell that Crazy Christmas Tree went so far as to sign up for Plenty of Fish. Ten thousand years from now, scientists of the future are going to dig up our Internetz and who knows what they’ll think.

But I digress. I was talking to a cousin from the other side of the family last night and she was all, "I haven't even taken my Christmas trees" (that's right, more than one!) "down yet," but she was pleased when I explained that you're not supposed to have taken them down yet because Wise Men, Bethlehem, etc. 

"That means I can put it off until next weekend," she said, happily.

And that's adulting done right.

It Wouldn’t Be a New Year Without Some Resolutions

Those of you who are still reading along at home despite my frequent periods of blog neglect will remember that I have a somewhat mottled track record when it comes to New Year’s Resolutions. I mean, who doesn’t. As previously established, only eight percent of those who make New Year’s Resolutions keep them. But I’m not a quitter, and I’m not going to let year after year of failure stop me from failing again.

But wait! I don’t always fail! In 2012, I resolved to quit smoking for the umpteenth time, and I actually did it! For real this time, not one of those “quit smoking for two months and then start again because everyone else is doing it” quit smoking attempts. Even if I sometimes sit in traffic and daydream about smoking the hell out of a cigarette, it still counts.

Last year, I resolved to start eating better, which…I mean…I stopped eating chocolate spread. That’s got to count for something.

This year, my friend Melody texted me two days before New Year’s and was like “let’s get drunk on New Year’s Eve so we can resolve to drink less next year” and OMG you guys, let's never drink again.

I also resolved to amass a collection of awesome cat T-shirts, because I’m 33 years old and it’s time I did something with my life. I already have one, so that’s a headstart:

It's a men's T-shirt, so it actually covers my entire torso when I lift my arms. Who knew?

But those aren’t the resolutions you came here to read, and they’re not the resolutions I came here to make. Those resolutions are just the icing on top of the determination cake.

In 2014, I resolved to write a book. I complained that I struggle with writing stories because I can’t think of any plots. Lots of people gave me some really unhelpful advice about how I should “just start writing and the rest will come, honest” because I guess they must have skipped over the part of the post where I explained that I have tried that strategy already several dozen times. One genius suggested that I just write non-fiction, which is of course what I decided to do.

If you read my 2014 Year in Review post, you’ll know that I only finished about 17,000 words of that book in 2014. So, technically I guess that still counts as a fail. And I didn’t even bother making any resolutions this year, but I kept plugging away and now I have 47,500 words. This is the year, guys, I’m really gonna do it. I’m gonna finish the book I resolved to write in 2014!

Or at least the first draft of it, anyway.