odd pear

[These poinsettias may at first appear to contradict the story below, but I made them in last year's flurry of activity.]
[And still they wait.]

There has been a remarkable lack of Christmas around these parts. Which makes me think I have suffered one of two possible fates:

1. I am the rube in someone else’s Christmas miracle story, whereby our personalities were magically switched during something as innocent as a handshake, say, and she gets to experience all the Christmas magic her usual Scroogy self has missed.
OR
2. I have been kidnapped by aliens and replaced with an android.

Maybe I should I back up a bit here. It’s not so much the lack of hall decking that has raised my suspicions, but it is the fact that I am unphased by said undecked halls that has me worried. Though I tend to the last minute – I have been known to wake up at 3 am to ensure Mom’s mantle was appropriately covered in coffee-filter snowflakes in time for the Christmas brunch that would begin at 9 am – I am a round-the-clock schemer of such crazy holiday feats. But this year? Not one scheme has hatched. There have been blips of ideas is all. And no wish to make them into anything more than that. No internal push at all.

Actually, that’s only half true. I am chock-full of internal push, but it is geared toward the longer term projects on my list, like:

sewing curtains for the kitchen,
sorting the stacks of books that now live on the floor and making room for them on the bookcase,
painting the bathroom,
unpacking that last, lingering box,
planting the little succulent garden that I have long dreamed of having live on my dining table.

I know: WTF?! I could be glittering and pom-ponning, festooning and wrapping for chrissakes! But all I want to do is nest. Not in the half-assed way I normally do wherein I unpack, sort, and put away most things (you know, except for the two or so boxfuls of miscellany I can't decide where to store), and not in the way that leaves a long list of uncompleted projects that I wistfully recall on my eventual moving day; I want to get it all done: art hung, tchochkes arranged, chairs placed just so.

I have ruled out a virus. I feel just fine: no fever, no clammy, no aching. I could also find reason to suspect my android theory. I’m sure a robotic version of me would emit sparks in the shower, or that the circuitry would get gummed up with all the food I dribble on myself and robo-Erin would end up lost in a buffering loop or some other telling slowdown, which I have not done.

Maybe I have been volunteered to beta test an altered, upgraded, 3.0 version of the holiday season that grants extra time rather than sucking every last second away? [Now that would be the stuff of legend.]