Christmas is right around the corner and as usual I’m not quite up to speed yet.

Shopping done? Nope.
Shopping started? Nope, don’t even have a list yet.
Cards sent? For which year? I’m still working on 1986.
Christmas lights up on the house? Nope, haven’t even untangled ’em yet.
Wreath mounted on the grill of the truck? Nope, still searching the garage for it.
Christmas tree up yet? Yes! Woo.

I have a little list of things that have to happen every year for it to start feeling like Christmas to me, and many of them either haven’t happened yet or happened when I wasn’t looking.

I have to hear these songs on the radio:

• The Kinks – Father Christmas
• Band Aid – Do They Know It’s Christmas?
• Bruce Springsteen – Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town
• The Eagles – Please Come Home For Christmas
• Elmo and Patsy – Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer

And I have to see these shows on TV:

• Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
• Frosty The Snowman
• It’s A Wonderful Life
• How The Grinch Stole Christmas

I haven’t heard most of the songs and I’ve missed all the TV shows, and because of that it feels more like mid-March to me than it does Christmas. But last night we decided to get seasonal anyway and put our Christmas tree up … and we were stymied right out of the gate.

Part of our tree-assembling and -trimming family tradition is that we play our Taco Bell The Stars Come Out for Christmas CD while we do the fake tree assembling and decorating. I picked it up at Taco Bell five or six years ago and it has become a seasonal member of the family. It’s a stellar CD, featuring Rush Limbaugh reading ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas, Kathie Lee Gifford singing It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas, Michael Martin Murphey (of Wildfire fame) singing Two-Step ‘Round The Christmas Tree, and other such fabulous recordings. Listening to it really makes you want to hurry up and finish whatever you’re doing so you can turn it off. So before we cracked the box we keep the fake Christmas tree in, I went looking for the Taco Bell CD. And couldn’t find it.

Christmas almost didn’t happen.

But then we regrouped and went with our alternate Christmas CD, the Wonderbra Naughty or Nice Holiday Favorites. With performers like Tanya Tucker (What Child Is This?), Wayne Newton (Silent Night), and Andy Williams (Joy To The World) its lineup isn’t nearly as impressively painful as the Taco Bell disc, but it still served to hurry us along.

So now Christmas is officially under way around here. We’ll spend tonight unpacking and untangling all the strings of lights we decorated the house with last year before we give up and throw them away in disgust, and then tomorrow we’ll go out and buy all new ones and I’ll wait ’til sunset to start crawling around on the roof and putting them up so I can be working in complete darkness before I finish and maybe fall off the roof and bust my skull open. Then, if I survive that, I’ll put the wreath on my truck and maybe buy a smaller one for my bike. And I’ll start my shopping a week or so after that.

‘Tis the season!