I am in the stage where I keep thinking of and buying Just One More Little Thing for someone whose list looks skimpy. I used to fight this impulse, but it is too inherent. What I do now, instead, is that if I DO overdo it (sometimes my impulses are CORRECT and I have NOT overdone it but have instead SAVED CHRISTMAS), I put the extra things aside for birthdays: they all have birthdays in the first half of the year, so this works well.

For the first time in my life, I bought scratch tickets. I think it’s a fun gift idea, and some of my coworkers give them out as co-worker gifts and I like that, but I was nervous! But it was just a vending machine in the grocery store, no big deal. The only thing I didn’t like is that BOTH TIMES I used the machine, another customer was waiting for a turn WAY TOO CLOSE and with a vibe as if I were stealing HER tickets. I wished for a way to buy multiples, because in one case I was buying twenty-five $1 tickets for co-workers, and it seemed like the only way to do that was to push the button twenty-five times. I then went back the next day to buy those same $1 tickets for the kids (it is hard to find good fun stocking stuffers for older kids), and a $5 ticket each for Paul’s stocking and mine. Very fun.

Wait: that is an inadvertent lie, about never buying scratch tickets before. Long, long ago, when I was just out of college and working at a grocery store bakery, there was a trend among my co-workers of buying $2 scratch tickets. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but it was something like we all bought a ticket on payday, and we all scratched them in the break room—so when you were taking your break, you’d stop at the customer service counter and get your ticket, and then you’d scratch it off to the audience of whoever else was taking a break, and they would tell you what they’d gotten. We liked the $2 tickets because they pretty often paid out $5; some of us would keep the winnings and others of us would extend the fun by using it to buy a $5 ticket. But that was easier, because other people told me how to do it, and I was buying it from someone I knew at the desk. This week was the first time SINCE then, and I didn’t remember how to do it or how it worked, and also it worked differently. Well, that was not a very interesting story.

Paul’s office closes for the eight days of Christmas and New Year’s, and everyone gets paid for that time. My library closes for a half-day on Christmas Eve, and is closed Christmas Day, and we don’t get paid for the time, and we go right back to work on the 26th. And all the kids have lots of days off: Henry doesn’t go back to high school until January 2nd, and the twins don’t go back to college until mid-January. It is going to be a little galling to leave them all lounging about as I go back to work. Or maybe it will be glorious to get out of the house, get paid to work on a day when hardly any patrons come in, and spend most of the shift chatting with co-workers about Christmas and eating the treats everyone brings in. I do wish we had the 26th off, though. That’s one of my favorite days, when all the work of Christmas is over and you can lounge around and enjoy the leftovers and gifts and treats.

I keep meaning to tell you about the pelvic-floor therapy and it keeps being a lower priority than other things I want to talk about, but let me tell you one thing. If you have trouble with suddenly feeling like you HAVE TO PEE (like when you come home, or when you are in/near a bathroom), even when you don’t actually need to pee all that badly, a trick to make the feeling go away is to stand up on tip-toes, then drop your heels back down, then back on tiptoes again, several times; the muscles you use for that are apparently connected to the muscles of the pelvic floor. Another trick is to speak to your bladder firmly but compassionately, and say “You are okay. You can wait a few minutes. I promise we will pee soon.” Perhaps you would like to say that in your head, and not out loud. Another trick is to WALK A DIFFERENT DIRECTION than you normally do. Like if you always come home and go hang up your coat and then go plug in your phone, and this makes your bladder think WE ARE HOME AND MUST PEE RIGHT NOW, instead go the opposite way into a different room; you would think this was too silly to even try, but I tried it and it actually worked.