Rambling Thoughts of a Sick Woman at 4:30 in the Morning.

We gather around the sparkling, heavily-decorated, star-topped evergreen boughs on the cusp of self-discovery. As children we sat on pins and needles with anticipated joy with the hopes that we would get the presents we wrote down in our letter to Santa; You know the one you agonized over for days (if not weeks) before you put it down on paper in ink with cute little drawings of Santa and miscellaneous other christmas trappings colored with red, green, yellow and white pencils.

This year contains a house of teenagers, young adults and lets be honest- old fart forty-ish stick in the muds- are we sitting with excitement? That's where the cusp comes in.
If your one of the old farts, did you buy all the gifts and nothing is a surprise or just shockingly, did something get placed under or on the tree that was lovingly chosen especially for you from the one who never shops?!

If your the young adults- the ones who live in dorms, studying their brains fried and eating Ramen Noodles to make it by until the next paycheck— will you get something fun and exciting that will make you feel like your younger self- sitting and playing with gifts all day? This is the question: at the end of the day, will we, feel elated that Christmas came or will we feel disappointment in what we received and let it cloud the rest of the holiday? This most definitely will be the deciding angst for the two teenagers sitting amongst the gathering- the ones who will feel the most disappointed and show it a thousand times brighter than the rest. They are the ones who want the biggest, the fastest, the newest of all gadgets and for some reason, always the most expensive gifts of all. The ones where only a few gifts are bought but many were dreamed about.

So here we sit believing that this year will be different than in previous years; where we were slightly let down by the uneventful realization that we are no longer children— we can no longer sit idly by knowing that Santa will bring us that one amazing gift that gets our juices flowing until next November where we start anticipating again. We try to forget this old wounded knowledge and convince ourselves that this is the year of unconditional belief— that we still know Santa exists and joy will be had by all...

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fire-side and his quiet home!  ~Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1836