Day Eleven

Tonight my dad, sister, and I went for a cruise after dinner to check out all the awesome and (in some cases) interesting Christmas lights around town. Let me just say, personally, I was SO PREPARED for Christmas this year that I put my lights up a year ago. It's called dedication... which is rare and undervalued. On our tour around town, pretty frequently we'd drive through a neighborhood and one or more of us would yell, "They got those at ACE!!!!"

It may seem strange to many that I would be so into Christmas, since I'm not the slightest big religious, but I grew up celebrating it and I love it. I kind of disregard the religious aspects and celebrate everything else. I love the time of year and the spirit of giving and the bright lights and driving slowly around Raton's annual City of Bethlehem out of tradition and just the magic of the season, and Santa! Not Santa in person, that's frightening. But the IDEA of Santa is amazing. The Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy COMBINED can't touch him! But I digress. I'm not trying to upset anyone, but, as Sheldon Cooper would lecture, it's also the ancient pagan festival of Saturnalia. It's just an AWESOME time of year! Can't we agree on that?

This will be the first Christmas of my life without my Grandma, and the first Christmas without Otis since I was 12. It will be strange, but I know we will all still have a good day.

My writing project is going okay. The challenge I'm having now is collecting scraps of the story from about five different journals and trying to put them together, in the right places. I keep finding mini-holes and I do my best to patch them. There's a reason a gave myself a year- I'll need it! But when I read a chapter that makes good sense and I enjoy, I just feel GOOD. I feel pleased with myself, and look forward to a whole book of that.

Maybe I'll get a better blog out tomorrow!

Sarah