Are we there yet?

It is the Eve of Russky Christmas. Russky Christmas Eve.

When I was a wee tyke, we would have two Christmases: American Christmas: presents! and Russky Christmas: Church! and a few presents! Now we just celebrate Russky Christmas: Church and presents!

Around Halloween I start to feel the weight of the holiday season settling in, and it becomes a countdown. Halloween: dress up, check. Thanksgiving: eat a lot. Check. American Christmas: a furious buildup of work at the office as folks try to shoehorn everything in before the end of year stuff and before they go on vacation, followed by a couple of weeks of dead silence and clock-watching, followed by weird coworker/manager gifting that puzzles everyone and makes almost everyone uncomfortable, followed by a couple of days off that I spend sleeping and hanging out with my immediate family.

This is closely followed by my mom's birthday, which I often forget because it comes so close after American Christmas. (It's not an excuse, it just happens...) I routinely panic because I've forgotten and fail to buy a gift because my mom assures me she doesn't need or want anything and I try to find the funniest card ever to make up for it. We have a nice dinner somewhere.

Then I realize it's time to buy gifts for all, and gift-buying ensues. Then I realize I have to wrap said gifts, and I do wrap some, but generally have at least ten items left to wrap on Russky Christmas Eve.

Finally Russky Christmas arrives, and we go to church and have the Festival Of Greed, followed by the Festival of Eating A Lot of Meat And Cheese. Much happiness, indigestion and exhaustion ensues.

Then comes the great dark of winter. My birthday and my dad's birthday follow in February, tiny lights in the abyss. My sister and I battle our varying degrees of seasonal affective disorder with sun lamps and vodka. Maybe the holiday countdown is a countdown to russkiness: I feel most Russian when huddled in layers of sweaters and coats and stoically trying to withstand cold weather blues.

I don't mean to sound ungrateful; Russian Christmas is, for me, a time to reflect on spiritual joys and feel gratitude for blessings, and I do. But even in the churchy sense, Christmas is the beginning of the story, and we build up from there to the loud jubilations and singing for Easter, the end of the story that is also the bigger beginning. So, it makes sense to me that russky Christmas brings me feelings of trepidation - it so closely coincides with the secular world new year, and the great dark, and questions both lofty and practical: will DC get snow, how much, will my car make it, what new shennanigans will our politicians and policies bring, will we survive and how?

My new year looks promising, but I'm wary. My new year looked promising last year, too, and well, it turned out to be The Year of Shit and Fans, to borrow a phrase from an ex. I wish everyone joy, and also luck and strength. Onward through the fog.