Christmas used to be my favorite holiday. My birthday was OK until my 30th, when I almost spent the whole day alone because my then-husband wouldn't bring our car home and I wasn't allowed to ride in the work truck, and then I finally did get to go to my old auntie's, and my parents showed up, and that was it. My parents and aunt were the only people who cared enough to do anything for my 30th birthday. Valentine's day was OK until 2006 when my then-boyfriend of 2 years chose that day to tell me that he had a new girlfriend, well not exactly new, they'd been seeing each other for a number of months. I guess telling me was his gift to her. Anyway, now I don't really like my birthday or Valentine's day.
Christmas though is special. I can spend months figuring out what to get people, I LOVE picking presents for people. I like baking, I like entertaining, and I like having a Christmas tree in the house. Christmas was my absolute favorite holiday.
This year though it's been ruined. My work, I got a project on Thanksgiving week that's been taking up 4-6 hours a day of my time, but I'm also the only person who can do these two other things. Those two other things re really just packs of things though. One of them is 40 things, and one is a dozen things, and I needed to be able to get them done between Thanksgiving and New Years. So there's basically 18 working days in December, so I needed to get about three of the things done every day. Each thing involves a lot of back and forth with outside agencies and a lot of testing, but three things a day is definitely doable....if I wasn't spending 4-6 hours a day on the project. I called out to my superiors several times that I was not going to be able to do ALL the things, but they haven't done anything about it. If I don't get these things done literally THOUSANDS of people will be at the least inconvenienced and at the worst one or more could die, so I'm really emotionally invested in the things, but I'm doing the best I can, and knowing that even then I will NOT get these things done is literally driving me crazy. I can't sleep, I'm exhausted, I'm despairing, crying every day, and have started having anxiety attacks for the first time in a few years. It's making it so I can't function at all at home. I have to keep it together at work, so all the falling apart is happening at home. I'm working extra hours when I can, sometimes even until midnight, but I don't have the energy to keep it up, so one day I'll work 12 hours and the next day I'll be exhausted after 7. I'm having a hard time getting to sleep so I'm having a hard time waking up, and I'm dragging myself into work at 9:30am. It looks bad. People are running out of patience with me too. They want me to do fun stuff and I'm too tired, or they want to talk about something other than how shitty my work is, or they don't know what to do when I can't stop crying and it's starting to irritate them.
With all the energy I'm investing in working and the worry I can't get rid of I have NOTHING left over for Christmas stuff. Everything is just another thing that must be done on time. On top of everything, No money showed up for any of Sheldon's three jobs in December. I guess everyone likes to put off paying until the next year to make the revenues look better. So we were waiting for the money to show up which we were planning to use for Christmas and it didn't. Luckily I did a weekend project at work that got me a $500 bonus...payable in gift certificates for specific stores, none of which I shop at. Kmart was one of the stores, so I just spent several hours trudging around Kmart looking for Evy's and everyone else's Christmas gifts. There wasn't anything fun about it. I wasn't able to really get any of the stuff I wanted to get, just a bunch of meaningless crap to fill the empty spaces under the tree so Evy won't be disappointed.
