Anticipation

It's making me wait.
It could be that it was the advent calendars that did it. Those twenty-four doors counting down to the big day. As the poet suggested, "The waiting is the hardest part." Looking out on the expanse of December and making it nothing but a countdown to the Big Day assures me that rumors of the War for Christmas are nothing more than a callous marketing ploy.
On top of this, drop the water-torture aspect of the music, steadily increasing in repetition and intensity starting just after Halloween and culminating in wall-to-wall snowmen, reindeer and baby Jesus in the days just before the celebration of all that Nativity.
Including that little ditty about how "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas." Maybe. If you count the glazed look in the kiddos' eyes and the inflatable manger that pops up every evening around sunset.  Candy canes? Maybe. Silver lanes? Not so much. Toys in every store? Come to think of it, there were some Hot Wheels piled in an ersatz display at the front of Best Buy the last time I stopped in to purchase the most recent labor saving device to add to our Google-assisted home. The five and ten has long since been replaced by the Dollar Store, where the sale-a-bration never ends.
What hasn't changed is the fever that builds starting the day after we return from Thanksgiving and culminates in this week during which precious little learning takes place. I have surrendered to the idea that I am simply housing kids in anticipation of the doors flying open on Friday afternoon and the quiet that will fill the halls after all the cellophane from the candy canes hit the floor.
"And mom and dad can hardly wait for school to start again."
Because it will.
You might not get the toy of the year or the trip to Hometown Buffet, but you will most definitely find yourself back inside that classroom once again after the Bowl games have all been played. Not as if it never happened, but once the realization sets in that those weeks of tension were all played out in order to get a few days away, our eyes start drifting down the calendar for the next big deal. One without quite so much rocking around the Christmas tree.