Winter: it's official!

It snowed! It finally snowed!


I love this time of year. Well, that's a little ridiculous for me to say, since I hate the cold and the snow and the bleak weather. But I do love the holidays! I suppose that the vision of Christmas laying ahead is enough to pull me out of despair and into joyous celebrating.

Even though we put our tree up the day after Thanksgiving and I've already begun my Christmas shopping, it just hadn't started to feel "Chirstmasy" yet. Not for me. I guess what I really needed to make it all real was a nice snowstorm, and boy did we ever get one of those on Friday night!

I must admit, freshly fallen snow is one of the more beautiful things in this world. I mean, push aside the fact that it is deadly, and cold, and just plain in the way most of the time, and you've got a really lovely gift from nature. It is also the one thing that signifies Christmastime more than anything else. Yeah, they have great Christmases in Arizona, but it's just not the same. Seeing that snow out there on Saturday morning, I felt as though a button had been pushed, a flag waved: Christmas is really coming!

So I feel more into the whole "spirit of the season" now. Like, it's okay to sing Christmas carols in church, and it's okay to turn on the lights on the tree, and, more than anything, it's okay to go nuts and join the throngs of holiday shoppers at the mall, which is filled to capacity daily with seething, squirming, excited crowds. I'm sorry to admit it, but I love it--that rush! That excitement of being in the middle of it all. No, the whole commercialism and buying is something else entirely that I won't get into right now, but it is so fun to shop for the people you love. How cool is it to find exactly what you know they want? You can't wait to see their face on December 25th.

So. On another subject, I'm set up for school for Spring semester. I made a couple of changes after talking to an adviser today (she was booked for 3 weeks before I could get in to say a word to her) and now I'm not only taking math (quantitative reasoning...we'll see how I do with THAT) and Modern English Grammars (sounds like a blast...haha), but now I'm signed up for Creative Writing! This will either be, as I see it, a lot of fun or a real let-down. Either way, it will help me decide on a Creative Writing emphasis or a Literary Studies emphasis. I'll have my Associates after Spring semester is over, and I've decided to go for my Bachelors. I must be crazy, right?

Speaking of crazy...Dave will be working seasonal at Toys R Us, since his Testing Center job gives him 3 weeks off between semesters (and that's a little long to not be working). I feel bad for pushing him to do it, but it will be nice to have a little extra money as opposed to dipping into savings, which is never fun to do.