Time Goes Fast Around the Holidays...

I find December a hard month to work. Even when I enjoy my job, as I do now, I still feel like it would be an absolute luxury to have the whole month off. This way, I could do all my shopping, bake, cook and generally let the holiday season pass by slowly instead of at the mad speed it seems to go when you do have to work.


I manage to squeeze in a fair amount of festive activities. I've been shopping since October so I get to avoid the mad dash of last-minute shopping for gifts. I've got my tree up. The Christmas cards are bought but just not written. I've managed to squeeze in a couple of Christmas movies.

But it'd still be nice to have the month off. It's such a buildup to Christmas, if you celebrate, obviously that it would be nice to have it come in the form of blocks of time to enjoy the season rather than the more likely little snippets of time we actually find.


Still, I can't complain. A year ago I was working for a company that didn't even bother to have a holiday party never mind give us any form of 'gift'. We didn't even get the mini candy cane in our mailboxes that we had the year before. This year, my company actually celebrates the holiday. Not only are we having a holiday happy hour for all of our consultants but my office is having a private party for just us employees at my boss's house. We are doing a secret Santa gift exchange. We also get a little bonus in the form of a gift card from our company.

It's nice. It makes me appreciate the fact that I got fed up and I found this job. Even though there are days like I had yesterday, there are also many, many good days where I realize that my boss actually wants me to have fun at my job and enjoy what I do.

This is still a new thing for me. I'm still waiting for someone to jump out and tell me its all a mistake, that I've been punk'd. I think I'm still suffering a little from post-traumatic-boss-disorder. To have a boss who makes sure he lets me know he appreciates my hard work at least once a week and who, when we've not had the best week, takes us all out for a beer and closes the office early...well, this is the type of job I've always wanted. It makes me feel like I'm part of something, that I'm a person and not just a body who is supposed to come in, do a job and not be allowed to have an opinion.


So, even though I can't take the entire month off, I'm lucky enough to work for a nice company who is perfectly content to let us leave a little early if we need to, provided we still get our work done.


It makes it a little easier to get errands run that are hard to do over lunch. Going to the post office, for example. I've mentioned before, I'm a big fan of the post office. I love letters. I love stamps. I love that sense of completion you get when you drop a package or bundle of letters off to be mailed. It makes me feel like I've done something productive.

It's just that sometimes, well, actually, almost always, the lines at the post office are long. They took away the stamp machine so if you want to buy stamps you either have to wait in the very long line or you can go to the automatic postage station. I like this station because it lets you mail out everything from an envelope to a large box just by hitting a few buttons. However, I don't like this station when all I want to do is buy some stamps and I'm stuck behind a person who has an entire bag full of packages to be mailed all over the world. Each one has to be entered, weighed and labeled properly. That's a long time to wait but it's still quicker than waiting in the post office.

So it's nice that I have a job that allows me to go to the post office before it closes. It makes the fact that squeezing in holiday activities between work and life a little easier.


Of course, if I found a way to take the whole month off and still get paid and still have a job, I wouldn't sniff at that either.

But since that's not likely to happen, I'll take what I can get.

Happy Thursday!