I made a point of meeting the bus in an apron yesterday. I’ve never really worn an apron, cooking dinner in haste with my just-came-in coat still on or padding through breakfast in pajamas and slippers. But this is Christmas, and I happen to own a Christmas apron, full-length red and green with big 1980s teddy bears all over it. So when I got home yesterday I decided to do some holiday baking. Sort of the last hurrah before I go into a long-term sub job and everything that is unwrapped, unwritten, unsent, unfinished, un-anything descends upon me, clawing for attention like stray children I absent-mindedly bore.

It does seem a little more frantic, a little more harried than ever before. Where is the energy supposed to come from? The time? The money? All, except my waistline, has thinned out these days. But we kept up with the Joneses this year–or we really tried to. Lights up the weekend after Thanksgiving NO MATTER WHAT (Bill really likes it when I talk like that!) Of course, it was not yet Advent so we didn’t cow-tow to a secular schedule and turn them actually ON, but man, oh man, they were UP! First time ever. Then, enter one 75-pound Airedale “pup” named Gus.

Augustine, now my least favorite living thing in the house (and that’s stacked up against a banded leopard gecko and a fire bellied toad) was given to Bill for his 50th. Somehow Gus got inexplicably–and inextricably–tangled in the beautiful 8′ blanket lights that the girls had strung over an evergreen tree using the van roof as a ladder, and that was it. Bill said he thought the dog was being electrocuted he jumped around so much–around and around and around–tearing down string after string of lights from the tree. We fought back: with yard-sale electric reindeer grazing in our front woods–so pretty to come home to lit. And the Christmas tree tonight, thanks to Bill and William. Not to mention several dozen packages wrapped and preventing several dozen dinners from being eaten on the now buried table.

So about every other night the dog vomits on the carpets I steam cleaned one day last week before I started my full-time sub job, and about every four to five days the van tire goes down to 27 lb of pressure because it’s got a slow leak but they tell me at Honda these are the $350 run-flat tires, so I say leak, shmeak. No worries. My dad gave me a portable compressor so I can pump it up myself in the school parking lot using the cigarette lighter. And about every day somebody has a concert or a book fair or a lesson or practice of some sort or just for spice–yes, a meltdown or a flunked test or a girl drama at school. Got to keep up with those, you know. Over it all, a much-delayed 7th grade science fair projects settles like a thick, newly-fallen snow, ensuring we will never dig out. So what if Gus has punctured holes in all of the roll wrap and we’re on our third night of Beefaroni? Last week, TMI, but we actually ran out of toilet paper at the Burk House–and coffee. Yikes! Guess I need to go to the store more often! Did you know the sodium content in that stuff is enough to stroke out even a six-year-old? And no! Since you asked, I am not ready for Christmas!

So I was baking in order to restore the years of stay-at-home sanity and the solidity of homemade goodness. Not to mention when you make them yourself you can up the chocolate. Sophie comes bounding off the bus from her happy 5th-grade year wanting to lick the bowl. Shortly she will ask to go ride bikes with the boys up the street. We are sworn to secrecy, lest she get teased at school, but they are nice “Yes Ma’am” kind of boys–when they aren’t wrestling copperheads. William, after pitching his first grade backpack in the woods and his coat in a tree, will race off to be alternately shredded and licked to death by the dog, who meets the bus not in smiling apron but in leaping, drooling, panting dervish-hood. Note to self: pick ONE, six-year-old boy or dog. Both together is a problem no plate of cookies–or a double vodka, for that matter–is going to solve. When we first got Gus, William’s bottom drawer of his dresser was designated “dog wear,” which he had to change into upon arriving home in the afternoon.

Ellie has another hour at the middle school where I frequently sub. She thinks it’s cool and she often comes to visit. When I’ve had her class before she willingly instructs me on how the teacher usually assigns homework or begins class or handles those “naughty” boys in the back turning on the gas in the science lab. Meet her bus in a Christmas Bear apron? That would be pushing it. I am currently the long-term substitute Media Center Specialist, which at least this time of year involves little more than checking books in or out and running one of the four DVD VHS players, which will stream any movie you want into any classroom of the building. Today my thumb hurts from pushing “Play” on The Polar Express so many times. And I had to walk past all those juicy documentaries on The Panama Canal, The Making of America, Animals of the Amazon, and Bill Nye the Science Guy to do it. Wonder if the History Channel minds that it is being upstaged by The Happy Elf. Don’t get me started on modern education. The girls once had a KINDERGARTEN teacher whose nickname was “Blockbuster.” Disgraceful. If you’re not going to come over, put your feet up in my family’s living room, and discuss the causes of the War of 1812 or instruct on simplifying fractions, then don’t you dare “pop in a video” in the middle of my child’s education. Smartboard, my pa-tootie. The technology we are trucking into the schools is only as smart as the educators and the students using them. Maybe I will send those teachers some cookies.

Now it’s Christmas vacation. This week: so far, so good at our little Christmas house. The dog, miraculously, has left the tree alone. Of course, we left our fresh-cut 7-foot Scotch pine COMPLETELY bare for the bottom two feet, so it seems that the most ornament- packed tree in town is wearing a petticoat of sorts. Or that it was decorated by Amazons who couldn’t bend over that far. The presents are all wrapped and nestled under the tree. The baking? Well, that’s done, thanks to my brief sojourn into sanity. Visions of sibling peace dance in my head. Now it must be time for that long winter’s nap…?

Wishing you and yours a happy, restful, enduring Christmas. Here, have a cookie.