So close and yet...

Up to now I was mostly paying lip service to my annual holiday funk. Good prior planning, scaling down, and apparently a healthy dose of denial was making me feel like it was all a lot worse than I remembered.

Tonight, though, I got the call. I hooked in to the reality of setting oneself down in the middle of a family, one whose daily life you aren't part of, one who, like any of us who see eachother 7 days a week, ends up hurting each other more and more.

Still didn't hit me for an hour or so. But now, I recognize the feeling. That hopeless sort of dread. It's similar to the feeling of facing an enormous job that one doesn't relish. You can see all the steps ahead, you know that you're capable of whatever is required to do the job and yet there's not a piece of it you can see as a reward.

It's not that any family is different. At least not any that I've known. And I've had the prvilege of joining probably 5 or 6 of different families for Christmas. So far.

My holy grail? A Christmas where everyone has fun and feels rewarded and relaxed, relishes in the accomplishment of a tough year and feels grateful for the people around them.

Yeah, I know, and I've never even seen Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street.