December Sundays

(photo via this blog.)

Yesterday Kathy and I put up Christmas lights across the front of our house.  This required 2 trips to Home Depot, 2 different ladders (the first one was 16 feet but wasn't tall enough!), 7 hours, 200 LED bulbs, and 1 very large bruise on my arm where we dropped the ladder on me.  But our house is looking good.  Last night we went to a holiday party, and today we got up and went to the Palisades mall, a four-story shrine to commerce in Nyack, New York, which might as well be in New Jersey.  We got lots of Christmas shopping done, and I even got myself a ski jacket -- my first coat that is actually warm, my third winter in New York.  After the mall trip, we put the Christmas lights on the bushes and had a classic Sunday dinner of roast beef, potatoes, and veggies with the kids.  Doesn't that sound lovely?  It was. 

Enter, Sunday Night Feeling.

Sunday Night Feeling is a term Kathy uses to describe the growing pit in your stomach that arises as you realize that your weekend is coming to an end.  I find that there are a few factors that exacerbate Sunday Night Feeling.  They are (1) having to work on Sunday night, (2) having a particularly nice or particularly horrible weekend, and (3) having a dreaded or boring Monday planned for yourself.  Tonight, I have all three.  (Notice, though, how I am writing this instead of facing the work I have to do.)  I often have really nice weekends in December because I like the holidays so much and there is so much I would rather be doing that going to work.  I think this means that this month will be fertile ground for Sunday Night Feeling to grow and grow to an award-winning size. 

For the last 15 minutes or so, I have been e-mailing with a friend from work about these thoughts we both have, which generally involve how nice it would be to get hit by a taxi (not hard enough to kill you, though), or have to have your appendix out, or something like that.  You know, the kind of thing that could justify a significant amount of time out of work, without death or permanent medical issues.  These kinds of thoughts are signifiers of acute Sunday Night Feeling (as well as a sign that we should maybe do something to lower our stress levels, if at all possible).  Still though, it's worth it to have a really nice weekend, even if you have to work Sunday night and contend with daunting, horrible, intense Sunday Night Feeling.  At least it's better than having Sunday Night Feeling because you feel like your whole weekend was wasted doing chores and now you have to go back to work.  Look at me, looking on the bright side, even as I'm fantasizing about runaway taxicabs and emergency appendectomies.