The life of a Catholic school teacher

(See? Christmas, NKOTB, and me, just naturally go together. Circa 1990.)

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Would anybody disagree with me if I said that this Christmas season has passed so quickly? This time last year I was writing a similar post about just how fast Christmas seems to come and go now that I'm an adult. This year, I'm still marveling at the speed of the holiday, but I'm also feeling melancholy. I'm at an in-between stage in my life I think. Christmases are so different now than they were when I was a child. I'm an adult now, so I wouldn't expect everything to be the same. However, I don't yet have children to pass on the memories and the traditions that I remember. This could be the reason for the tug at my heart I'm feeling this season. Or is it the fact that I haven't seen my family in a long time? It's been a year since seeing my mom, about 3 years since seeing my sisters and their children, and even longer since I've visited my dad. I can't even remember the last time I spent a Christmas with any of my family. Though I miss them dearly, I wouldn't feel right not spending Christmas with my fiance and his mom. That's my new tradition. That's my life as it is now. I don't have a clever ending for this post...I'm feeling a wave of sleepiness wash over me and I'm desperately wanting to get to bed all of a sudden. The Christmas tree is lit as I prepare to sign off for the night, not entirely decorated yet, but still a bright beacon of Christmas to remind me that life goes on no matter how much things and/or people change.

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Because of the medicine I take at night, I can always count on being in a very deep sleep all night. As a result, I am able to have, or remember, very vivid, lengthy dreams every night. The dreams I have usually always leave me scratching my head. I have a couple of dream interpretation dictionaries on the shelf because there are some strange things that pop up in my dreams. I still haven't found the meaning behind coming across an orca whale stranded in the parking lot of a hospital that I am rushing into. There are some recurring dreams that I have that I don't have to guess the meaning behind. I quit smoking about 6 years ago and every now and then I'll have a dream where I am smoking. Though in the dream, I have already quit and I know I shouldn't be smoking. There's a feeling of guilt that accompanies the act in the dream. I always wake up feeling very relieved that it was just a dream and my decision to quit is reaffirmed. I find that those dreams usually come at a time when I'm tempted to start up again. There is one recurring dream, however, that I find relevant to Christmas. Every now and then I will dream about waking up on Christmas Eve, only to find that I have missed the entire Christmas season. I've missed all the Christmas music, the television specials, and the general air of anticipation. Now here it is, 4 full days before Christmas and I haven't missed anything 'Christamsy', but how can it possibly be that it is only 4 days until Christmas?! That's the part that baffles me. This entire year has gone by SO fast! It seems like I have been flipping pages on the calendar every other day. This isn't the first time that I have noticed time going by fast. Every Christmas, for me, brings about a sense of "Where has this year gone?". I look at Christmas as an adult as the direct opposite of Christmas as a child. When I was a kid, as I'm sure it is for every kid, Christmas took forever to arrive. Now, the days left can be counted on one hand. I don't think time is going to slow down any time soon though. The next step in my life will be to have children of my own and I'm sure that all parents will agree, time passes by so quickly when you are watching your children grow. So for now, I'm going to do my best to cherish the remaining time that I have before the Christmas music stops being played constantly on the radio and a new year is upon me.

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