Three weeks to Christmas

We awoke on Saturday to two or three inches of snow. I shoveled, because I like to shovel, and Doug walked the dogs in the howling wind, because he likes to be nice to me.

We decorated the tree--LED lights this year, which lack the warm glow of the old-fashioned lights but are less likely to set our tree on fire. Unwrapping and re-discovering all those quirky ornaments from years past--the glass tomato, the tiny dog dish, the birchbark canoe we bought our first Christmas together, the glass hiking boot, the ceramic whale P.Miller sent me when she lived in Alaska, the Russian ornament that Guv gave to Doug his last Christmas.

Went upstairs in the mid-afternoon and there was Boscoe lying on the bed, just as though he did this every day of the week. Which he used to do, but has not done in months. How the heck did he get up there? He's not telling. And neither is Riley.

I've been thinking about my "meaning of Christmas" essay, and I have some ideas. I'm going to sketch something out tomorrow. It's a story that will be familiar to some of you, but it needs developing. We'll see.

Wrote Christmas cards, thought about baking cookies, read through the rest of the old letters that P.Miller dropped off for me. My goodness, it's weird to see my life all condensed and distilled -- nearly ten years zipping past, all a blur of witty anecdotes, writing conferences, fights with editors, breakups with inappropriate men, books I read that I barely remember now, freelance pieces I wrote that I don't remember at all.

It's nice, though, to catch little glimpses of Toby. He shows up in almost every letter, usually smiling at me with his big triangular smile and droppping tennis balls hopefully at my feet.

The angst of last week stays with me; will my job change? Will my friends get laid off? Will I? Will our pay be slashed? Will our newspaper go bankrupt? I suspect that most of those things will come to pass in the next few months.

But those are problems too big for me to solve. Tonight we will go to a Christmas play, and then come home and build a fire and turn on the tree lights. The dogs will snore in their chairs. We'll have a little Bailey's, and then we will go to bed.