December, Faster Than the Speed of Time

It starts out with people saying, “Only a month until Christmas” and you think: “I've got lots of time.”

It sneaks up on you. It gets busier at work, you get busier at home, you have more meetings to attend; and then there's the parties. Before you know it, it's nine days before Christmas, no more pay days and only two days off. What happened to the month? There's still so much to do. The tree isn't up, the shopping is not done, you have people to visit, food to buy, the house to clean, laundry to wash; the list goes on.

Why couldn't December go at a February pace. The shortest month of the year always seems like the longest and December, one of the longest, always seems like the shortest. And it seems to get worse every year as you silently curse the people who are organized as they tell you they finished their Christmas shopping in October.

I think that we do it to ourselves though. We thrive on pressure and December is when we can get the biggest mouthful, trying to choke it down as we run off in a panic to our next imperative task. We need to be busy and we like to have the attention as we tell others how much we still have to do before the big day. We all know it's coming and we could really prepare ahead of time but we don't. Everyone has the same 365 days in a year. That's why some stores will be open 24 hours a day before Christmas and some will even be opened on Christmas day! There was a time, not too long ago (I think it was the year before we went from a paper dollar bill to a loonie) everything was closed on Sunday -- every Sunday. Everything was closed and no one worked. Can you imagine what that was like? Maybe things were slower then, less commercialized.

Were things better then? No, different. We are evolving. I'm sure that, back in the time when everything was closed on Sundays, that people felt busy as well, remembering back to a time when they seemed “not quite so busy.” Was there a time when everything was closed on Saturday as well as Sunday?

It will be interesting to see what the future brings. How much busier can we get? Maybe we are not any busier at all. It could be that we are just a different kind of busy and we adjust our lives accordingly.

Something to think about, but I have to go now, I've got so much to do today. Christmas will be here in nine days, you know!