Twas the Night After Christmas

And all through the house, not a creature was stirring, except for the cat, who insisted upon going outside, the boy, who needed to get tucked back into bed, and a scruffy oaf stumbling about, cursing the manufacturer of the toy lodged in the sole of his foot.

Merry Christmas, Mister Scrooge

It’s odd. The lead-up to Christmas is a blur. I remember bits, kind of like flash cards, but if you asked me to string it all together into a coherent block, I’d shake my head and shrug my shoulders.

I guess it’s because the world doesn’t stop rotating. Everything carries on as it always does. There’s a forced sense of merriment, of course, and the stores pull out all the stops to lure us to buy their wares, and the television blares out the seasonal ‘Grinch’, ‘Christmas Vacation’ and ‘Die Hard’, yet the tasks in the Jira backlog are still there, the administration still piles up, the test servers still indicate a failing test suite.

There are still meetings to be attended, nappies to be changed, meals to be cooked, error logs to be investigated – Work won’t go away simply because of a season.

Scrooge

Bah! Humbug!

No, no, no. It’s not like that. I like Christmas, I do. Heck, I voluntarily (read involuntarily) dressed up as Santa to hand out the Kris Kringle presents.

No, my beef is not with Christmas, it’s the whole quasi Parkinson’s Law thing that’s going on: One has the capacity to continue one’s duties on top of all the merry-making, not to mention the extra load of tying things off for the holidays. Rather than stress levels going down, they go up. There is less time to do more work.

By the end of it all, like right now, I’m exhausted.

I want to write, I want to visit the park with the boy, I want to clean the house. There’s only so much caffeine can do. The most I managed to muster yesterday was a trip to the hardware shop to put up some shelves for the bathroom.

Maybe Scrooge isn’t such a bad guy, he’s just a realist who understands that when the frivolities end, the work not-yet-done will be there. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to extract a pointy toy car from my foot and go and clean up the backyard.