Christmas crescendo

Crescendo (kre-shen-doh): a gradual, steady increase in loudness or force.

I think this word perfectly describes the week before Christmas, especially if you and your spouse are both notorious procrastinators. Hey, nothing would get done if it weren't for the last minute, right? So we started our shopping last Friday, and amazingly enough, got nearly everything we wanted. My husband has to go back and buy a bicycle for our daughter in a couple of days, only because we couldn't figure out where to hide it in our house. We thought maybe we could just get one in the box and we would assemble it on Christmas eve, but they assemble all of them at the store right when they get them.

Waiting until the last minute is tough when you have packages to mail out in time to arrive before Christmas. We decided to make DVD slideshows for the relatives with most of our pictures from this year. This makes for a nice gift, but is stressful since it involves relying on the computer to get the job done. And as we all know, computers can hardly be relied upon for anything. So a few computer crashes and DVDs-turned-coasters later, we got all 9 DVDs completed and packaged last night around midnight. Since I had to work at the school the next day, I wanted to get to bed early. No such luck. Then my husband got the wonderful job of going to the post office in the morning to mail all the packages, which we thought would be dreadful (as most post offices are the week before Christmas). But this is yet another advantage to living in a small town - he only had one person in front of him and got done very quickly.

The overall tone at the elementary school today was total chaos. The kids are all worked up and excited for Christmas break. I can't imagine what it will be like by Friday. Hopefully no one will get sick and I won't have to substitute any more this week. Then maybe I can get more of the gifts wrapped so we won't have to do everything on Christmas Eve.