Waiting

Everyone is so busy with holidays, but not me. I am basically killing time until the holidays are over and people go back to their regular lives. For now, everyone is away on vacation, entertaining guests who are visiting them on their vacations, keeping an eye on the storms, rushing around making pies, delivering said pies as presents, all that stuff.

Yesterday I donated some books to the library. Made a great dinner. I read a book today. Went to get milk. Wrote a couple of thank you notes. Looked for jobs.

9am is going to visit his parents for a week or so. Me? I'm just waiting. I'll be relieved when it's all over. That's the hard thing about being jewish in a society that celebrates Christmas. There's so much build-up to Christmas. You can't avoid it. The decorations, the sales, the random bits of conversation you overhear. The consumerism is beyond rampant. Even the people who like to say they're making all their presents still have to buy the yarn to knit or buy the chocolate to make the brownies.

I'm sitting it all out. Most years I buy presents well before Hanukah (except for that year that I couldn't pull it together in time and my brother and I agreed to postpone the holiday until March, which I highly recommend, by the way), and take advantage of all the sales. Not this year. Not last week, but the week before I bought a hot chocolate. Each time I want to buy something I remind myself of that hot chocolate. That was it for this month. Good thing it was a tasty hot chocolate, huh?

So all the signs are around that Christmas is coming. The lights. The commercials urging you to run out and buy, reminding you how many more days you have. Then Christmas comes but nothing happens, because you're jewish. There's build-up, but no climax before the let-down.

Give the jew girl toys.