It’s the middle of December, 7:30 in the morning, and quite cold - cold for everywhere, but especially cold for Maryland. Something is wrong with our furnace, so it’s cold inside and out, but I have a space heater blowing right at me, so I’m fine. The rest of the house feels like a postwar bedsit in London, but my little spot is fine, even cozy.
I’m looking out the window, watching a fat little squirrel who appears to be watching me, too. He’s very still, and his little paws are resting on his very round belly, and he’s just staring. This fat little squirrel (no fat-shaming, it’s December and a squirrel should be fat) has a rotund, dark brown and light brown mottled body - an unusual phenotype. He also has a very fluffy tail. I want to open the blinds all the way to see him more clearly but then I’d scare him away.
After a few minutes, the fat little squirrel climbed down the fence on his own. I guess he realized that he wasn’t getting any food from me, and that he’d have to go out and find his own breakfast. I hope he found some good birdseed on the ground. The birds get everything handed to them, and they’re wasteful with the seeds.
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We thought that the furnace was fixed yesterday. Someone came and fixed it and left with more money than he had when he came in, and it did work for a few hours, but then it stopped. The furnace guy is coming back to figure out what he might have missed. It was cold in most of the house last night, but we had a fire in the family room and a space heater in the kitchen, and we were very comfortable. It’s cold outside, so I do hope we can get the furnace fixed but if not, I think we can live without it for a bit.
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It’s Friday now, 13 days before Christmas. I have a lot to do but I have already done quite a bit. My tree is up and decorated, and I wrapped all of the presents that I have already bought. I still have some shopping to do but I won’t have a huge pile of parcels to wrap on Christmas Eve.
Yesterday, my mother turned 81. I tend to get into full Christmas gear on my mother’s birthday, December 11, exactly two weeks out. When we were children, we started the Christmas countdown on the 11th. It’s the same length of time now as then, but a countdown to a long-anticipated celebration is a different thing from a countdown to a hard deadline. When you’re a grown-up, Christmas is a deadline. It shows up on December 25 whether we’re ready or not.
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It’s Saturday now, 9:15 AM and I have a plan for today. Two pounds of butter are sitting on the kitchen counter, and everyone has been warned not to put the butter back in the refrigerator. That butter is exactly where I want it. I also have flour, sugar, brown sugar, baking soda, vanilla extract, eggs, and four bags of Nestle semi-sweet chocolate chips.
Yes, that’s right - it’s Cookie Day, bitches!
Please excuse me. You’re not bitches at all. You’re lovely people. I just like to say “It’s Cookie Day, bitches!” Laughing at my own jokes is one of my coping strategies. I’m easily amused. That’s why I’m such a delight.
Yes, Cookie Day is coming a week earlier than usual. I mean, it seems like Potato Day was just yesterday. But my son will be home next weekend after a weeklong swim team training trip in Florida, and he wants us to do something together as a family, and I also have Christmas parties to attend, and so I moved Cookie Day up a week so that I can be social next weekend. I know from experience that I can’t handle cookies and parties in one weekend. So today, I’ll make the cookies and freeze them. As always, I’m not looking forward to cookie baking at all - AT ALL - but I’ll be happy not to be spending next weekend in the kitchen.
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It’s Sunday morning, clear and sunny and very cold, and it snowed a bit overnight, so it’s sparkly and bright outside. Even better, my freezer is stocked with hundreds of cookies that I made yesterday. We have cookies for days. We have cookies to serve guests and we have cookies to give as gifts.
It was an all-day thing, making those cookies, a task that combines two of the things that I like least: Disorder and tedium. Making cookie dough is tedious, and rolling out the little balls of dough and laying them out on cookie sheets and putting them into the oven and taking them out and laying them out on the cooling racks while monitoring the next batch in the oven is mind-numbingly tedious. The only thing that keeps me from lapsing into a coma when I’m making cookies is the heart-palpitating anxiety of being surrounded by a mess and not being able to do anything about it. It’s hard to express just how happy I was to slide the last batch of cookies into a freezer bag, a happiness surpassed only by finally getting my kitchen clean. I’ll still find little bits of cookie dough or tiny spills of flour for the next few days, but it looks clean in there, and I don’t have to make cookies again for another year if I don’t want to. And I won’t want to.
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It’s ten days until Christmas now. I am not 100 percent ready but I’m so much more ready now than I was at this time last week. Most of my shopping is done and everything I’ve purchased so far is wrapped and under a tree that is fully decorated. Between the tree and the other decorations inside and out, the house looks very festive, if a little cluttered. Christmas is the only time that I like a little clutter. I grew up in a tiny rowhouse in Philadelphia in the 70s and 80s. In December, we covered every surface in those little houses with Christmas swag. Watch the original Run-DMC “Christmas in Hollis” video if you want to see what working class inner city homes looked like at Christmas time back in the day.
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There’s just over a week until Christmas now, and just over two weeks until this year comes to an end. I’ve learned the hard way during the past few years not to get snotty with my sendoff to the outgoing year because its replacement will invariably barge in with a bad attitude and a surplus “hold my beer” energy. At least I’m not one of those deluded people out here saying that there’s nowhere to go but up; that 2026 can’t possibly be any worse than 2025. We’re nowhere near hitting bottom. 2026 could absolutely be worse than 2025. So I’m going to keep it respectful.
I saw the fat little squirrel again today. He’s a distinctive-looking squirrel, so I’m reasonably sure that it’s the same one. No Christmas for squirrels, but he’s still getting ready. He’s burying nuts and eating everything in sight. Between his considerable fat stores and his buried treasure, he’ll be more than able to withstand the winter. And that’s all it is to him, just winter. He won’t observe the passage from one year to the next. He’s lucky because he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. But I’m luckier because I can hope. After all, 2026 could also be absolutely better than 2025. It should certainly try.
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