Between holidays...

Somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas lies chaos.

Don't get me wrong. I love a good bout of chaos. Nothing shakes up a book like having the universe upended, and as a life lesson, chaos can't be beat. We learn to think on our feet, to adapt to a new reality on the fly.

But bloody buggering hells... enough!

I've had a love/hate relationship with holidays for a while now, starting when my dad announced, two days before Christmas '08, that he was moving to Texas. Right after the New Year. Now, I can understand wanting to get away from the cold and snow up here in the Northeast, but my heart broke at the thought of my dad being 2,000 miles away, instead of a 2-hour drive from me.

Then there was Thanksgiving '12, when my stepmom called as I was in the middle of prepping the turkey. Note to all of you: do not answer the phone if your hand is up a turkey's ass. It's going to be someone telling you something you don't want to hear. In my case, it was hearing that my dad had end stage cancer, and was coming back home to die.

This year, I waited until the day after Thanksgiving to discover I have kidney stones, like dad before me. I've always been my dad's child, so color me unsurprised. But now the whirlwind of getting ready for the holidays includes trying to get an appointment with a doctor that's less than two and a half months away (really!) and listening for the sound of my dad's laughter.

Maybe I'll skip holidays from now on. November will be NaNo and December will be Winter Solstice. Much better! But then I'd miss the turkey, and the family, and the traditional chaos...