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Sapping the spirit of the occasion

I don't know, maybe I'm nuts. Was I the person who said last week that I was finding 'the manic crush of the Christmas rush reassuring, comforting even'? I hadn't yet surfaced from a month of late nights spent at the Academy for Performing Arts directing a rollicking student production of Bye Bye Birdie.

But as the curtain came down on the final performance, it rose on the comedy of errors that is my domestic life at Christmas time. I can't just celebrate Christmas . . . I have to 'do' Christmas and while I may not do it in style, I always do it on schedule.

The overseas gifts are sent just after the Jack O' Lantern has been chucked out and the Christmas photo of the kids is usually snapped before Thanksgiving. The tree, ordered in early November, delivered on December 1, is up and decorated by the 2nd.

Well, the tree arrived on time but stood naked for three nights while I tore the flat apart looking for last year's really cool Christmas tree lights. They were terrific because, though they were 'musical', and I use that term in the broadest sense, you could shut off the sound after they lit up and (this is the cool part) you could adjust the fader so the 'blink' could sort of 'slow fade'. Never mind that every time you plugged the lights in, a manic electronic Christmas medley kicked in with Casio versions of I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, Walkin' Through A Winter Wonderland and Angels We Have Heard On High all screeching simultaneously. The slow fade was worth the mad dash to turn off the 'music'.

'This tree is depressing, sitting there with nothing on it. When are we gonna decorate it, mom?' As soon as I find . . . the really cool lights . . . I put away last January in order not to repeat the frustrated last-minute dash for tree lights when it is discovered that the old ones had burned out. 'Quick! Everybody into the car. We're going to get another set of those lights tonight !' I tore around Wan Chai, from stationery store to stationery store, in search of the 'slow fade', and bought four strands of the silent 'blink'.

'I'm ahead of the game,' I whispered to myself nervously as we hung the last icicle on the madly flashing tree. Ahead of the game is where I like to be. I'm a checklist kind o' chick and I'm making that list and checking it twice. Gonna find . . . gotta find . . . Where's that list? That's okay. I'll just make one up right now. Just get a pen and . . . there are nothing but broken tipped, rubberless coloured pencils but I have found some paper on the dining table . . . lots of paper actually. Paper dated three weeks ago, that reads: Dear Parents, there was a misprint in last week's newsletter. The annual Christmas Fair is on the same day as your annual Christmas cocktail party so please retrieve those invitations you posted yesterday because if you don't show up to see your daughter perform Silent Night with the school choir she will grow up to be a prostitute.

Hey, the husband is a parent, he can video the choir recital while . . . I pour bathtub gin down the throats of my friends and dance the Charleston round the 'blinking' Christmas tree. What kind of a mother misses the school Christmas Fair? The kind that missed the deadline for posting her own mother's Christmas present. I TRIED! I REALLY TRIED! I stayed up nights watching the goofy Holiday Greetings that precede posting deadlines for the most remote corners of the planet. How many parcels did you send off to Barundi this year? But I missed the deadline for the US! Merry blinkin' Christmas! I gotta stop 'doing' Christmas because in a vain attempt to get it all done, I'm missing out on the celebration of my favourite time of the year.

So as the Christmas lights blink silently, if frantically, in the background, I ponder ways to put a nice slow fade on all this frenzied activity and get some meaning back into the season . . .

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