To Love About December...

• Feeding the kids cake for breakfast...
• And enjoying coffee and cookies for mine.
• Realizing that there's a reason...a good one...that they don't show movies like National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation during Primetime when your daughter repeats after Clark Griswold like she's eloquently fluent in a desirable foreign language, "Kiss my Ass! Kiss my Ass! Kiss my Ass!"
• Somehow there's always 1 more (or 10 more) presents to buy, and a batch more (or 2 or 5) of cookies to bake.
• You make a mockery out of the word budget and cringe when you hear the words best sale of the season.
• You find yourself singing along with Mariah Carey about all you want for Christmas and suddenly have a strong urge to crash your car, but you can't because no one will ever know where you've hidden all the gifts you've just gone into major debt to procur.
• You take your kids shopping to buy gifts for others and they end up pouting or crying because you won't buy them anything, and they never do this any other month of the year!
• The white elephant exchange turns into a free for all because even though there have been 365 days since the last one, still no one is sure of the rules.
• You have to print more cards because you get greetings from people who didn't make your pared down list and the guilt sets in.
• The cats decide that taking the ornaments off the tree and kidnapping Baby Jesus from the manger are fabulous forms of entertainment while you are out happily shopping or whistling while you are working to pay the bills you're racking up.
• It's acceptable for grown-ups to wear light-up plastic necklaces, reindeer ears and Santa hats.
• You don't even bat an eye lash that you are putting 5 pounds of butter in your grocery cart week after week, or take note of the uncanny correlation between said purchase and the way your pants don't quite fit like they used to.
• Cocktail wennies and meatballs and mushroom puffs and cheese and sausage make up a food group of their own.
• You shamelessly bribe your kids with elfin ears.