A Festive, Productive Weekend...

I tried to hold onto the weekend but as is always the case with the passage of time, it slipped away from me just as I was enjoying it most.

Friday passed slowly at work. You might be happy to know that my broken chair situation in the office is being remedied. They bought me a tube of glue. Sadly, I am not exaggerating for comedic effect: They spent thousands of dollas on new computers for quite a few of the staff members and they gave me a tube of glue. To be fair, our HR manager is taking care of the actual gluing but part of me would seriously love to take that tube of glue and show them where to stick it.

However, I need my job, as has become my mantra.

Besides, I had an entire weekend to decompress from the fury of being shown a tube of glue. It was a lovely weekend as well so I'm going to start out the week by thinking positive. I feel like the weekend was nothing but business. I managed to completely clean my house, cook a three course meal for my lovely parents who came down to visit and to shop at Jungle Jim's for holiday supplies. (Note to Jungle Jim's: Can you please stock some quail eggs? Your mantra is "Welcome, Foodies!" and any good Food-Network-Obsessed-Foodie knows that quail eggs are important to gourmet cooking. I just want to try them and ever since I made up my mind to buy some the next time I saw them, I've never been able to find them anywhere!)

Anyway, moving on. I also managed to finish my novel completely. Yes, I know I said I was finished last week when I 'won' the National Novel Writing Month challenge. I did win that. I wrote 50,000 words in a month. Well, actually, to be completely honest, it was really only about 3 weeks but I had a lot to do in November so it's hard to write every day. But even though I'd met the word count, it still lacked an ending. I gave it one on Saturday night at about 12:30 a.m. Interestingly, it's not at all the ending I thought I'd give it; instead it's a sequel-hungry, slightly black-humoured ending. I quite like it, actually.

In all honestly, I love this novel I wrote. Not only is it the silliest thing I've written in ages but it's actually quite funny. In addition, it truly has helped me scale that enormous bump in the writing road that almost made me quit a few times. It reminded me that writing is supposed to be fun and if you can't laugh at a demon's version of Red Riding Hood, what can you laugh at?

I'm back to feeling empowered in life because I have something other than my job to care about. I can go home and hide in my own creative efforts and it makes the drag of a humdrum day disappear.

I'm also loving that Christmas is coming. I love the holidays. I love the cliche parts, the classic parts, the parts that make you tilt your head with delight because it's just so....fun. I love the movies: I watched "The Holiday", one of my favourite new Christmas 'classics' with a friend on Saturday and it was lovely. We made dinner, drank wine and just got to be girls. It was fun. I'll probably watch "Elf," while writing Christmas cards. "Love Actually." is soon to be on my playlist. I baked gingerbread today. I have my decorations up and I'm listening to carols. If there's a bigger Christmas cliche than me, I'd like to find him or her.

So, all in all, even though it's srill about three weeks to Christmas, I'm already celebrating. Every day will be something small, something nice to remind me of the season whether it's bringing in my miniscule, cute, metallic tree to work to sit on my desk or it's drinking a cup of holiday Chai and inhaling the scents of nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon: All the scents of the season. It might be taking in some leftover gingerbread stars to eat when I'm reaching that point in the workday when I'm ready to pound my head against the monitor. It might be tuning my iPod so that I can hear the Trans-siberian orchestra, my very favourite Chirstmas music, to drown out the chatter of my coworkers who are all just way too happy to be at work.

No matter what I do to honour the season, I love the month of December, several of my favourite people in the world have December birthdays including my parent's and my best friend. It's a good time of year. I plan to appreciate every single moment, and not dwell on that stupid, annoying tube of glue.

Now, if it was glitter glue, that'd be another story.

Happy M0nday.