Winter

My favorite time of year.

I love day after day after day of rain and clouds and icy roads and frost.
Naked trees, the landscape devoid of color, all my hard work in the yard hidden till spring. After planting all those bulbs, I was so excited at the prospect of spring and the "SEE YOU IN DIVORCE COURT PINDICK" message to the S/A lovingly spelled out in crocuses on the front lawn that all the next week I repeated at LEAST 20 times a day (to the dawg, to my daughter, to myself out loud), "Oh boy oh boy, I can hardly wait till spring."

After a day or so, as soon as I started on the "oh boy" part, R would finish the sentence along with me (but did not do the Bulb Dance with me at the same time). Soon my daughter tuned me out, her eyes glazing over at the first leap about the house, and I might have been talking to myself (which is a common occurrence), and even the dawg (yes THAT dawg), instead of jumping about with me in happy doggy glee (the reason for the merriment taking a back seat to the excitement of the moment), soon lost interest in the spectacle of me prancing around the house repeating my mantra and retreated under the bed.

The best thing about winter though, is Christmas. That is when the oft-times debilitatingly severe depression that has been plaguing me since I was a child REALLY shows its true colors, replete with bizarre behavior (even for me) fueled by holiday excesses of festive drinks.

I always did hate Christmas, from when I was small with a mother and father who fought all the time. I'd hide in my room, sometimes curled up in the bowels of my closet, to get away from the screams of derision from both sides and the crashing of crockery and the thumps and bumps to punctuate the general cacophony. It seemed to culminate around Xmess time; the true meaning of OUR family Christmas usually ended up with my mother escaping the house to take up company with her "friend" who lived around the corner.

Sometimes when things really got out of hand, she would take to walking up and down our street holding hands with this friend and turning her head at the appropriate time in an approximation of hiding her existence from our house. Looking out the window and wondering WTF was going on, it was probably then that the seeds of hatred were sown for Christmas in general AND the lying conniving mother in particular.

On my own and booking a twoo week block of holiday time every year, I reveled in drunken debauchery during Christmas, blotting it out with its false cheeriness and its commercialism run rampant. Fueled by the mad crowd running helter-skelter trying to purchase everything in sight for relatives who were virtually ignored during the rest of the year then grudgingly invited over for tense get-togethers to exchange trinkets and useless gewgaws that will gather dust in closet corners or be re-gifted to some half-wit next year.

I never put up a tree nor even owned any decorations, preferring to see a double vision of the garish tinseled monstrosities at my local watering holes, filling their coffers with hard-earned cash and commiserating with other like-minded Grinches the vulgarities of the season and to go home and crawl into my thilthy cold little bed alone, blissfully alone.

When I got married and had a child I thought hey, Christmas is for kids, perhaps it will be different now. And it was, for a few years. That lasted till she was 4; by then the bloom on the rose had faded and I lost interest again in the whole stressed-out don't have time for self-indulgent wallowing season. But alas, by then I had acquired 4 big boxes of decorations.

Year after year, I acquiesced to the status quo and grudgingly put up those decorations every year. Well, I am SICK of this crap every year, dreamed up by a cola company.

SO WHY, do you ask, do I still do something I HATE just to appease my child? Because I am a Good Mother, and don't want to pass on to her my cursed hatred of winter and xmess.

In fact if the truth be known, the only good thing about xmess is it's a good excuse to get a buncha booze that you don't normally have kicking around the house, and to drink it down then replenish it till the holidays are OVER.

I HAVE taken a different tack the last two years though....instead of dreading the upcoming festivities, I am welcoming it with open arms. Because the faster it gets here the faster it's gone till next year and spring will be just around the corner.

And the faster that message will show up on the front lawn, oh boy oh boy!