Signs of the season

After the intense end-of-semester marathon of grading and paperwork, I have a little trouble winding down and acting as if I'm really on break. Today, though, I see signs that the semester is loosing its insistent grip on my person. To wit:

I wake up before 6 without an alarm, but instead of checking e-mails while eating breakfast, I enjoy a cup of hot chai and some short stories by Elizabeth McCracken before diving into the grand and glorious mess of baking Christmas cookies--and I don't even get properly dressed until the morning's half over.

When the Texas kid finally gets out of bed, I encourage him to lick the last remains of rich chocolate frosting out of the mixing bowl--for breakfast. I'm just happy he's here in one piece. He's been chortling about the patch of black ice he hit in Little Rock, Arkansas, which sent his car (my car!) into a skid and a slide and a 360-degree-spin in the middle of heavy traffic on a bridge, resulting in nothing worse than a paint smudge (0n a 14-year-old car that is more smudged than painted). Under the circumstances, chocolate frosting for breakfast seems appropriate.

Later we're shopping in a quaint little store in our historic downtown shopping district when the relentlessly cheerful "Jingle Bell Rock" comes on the sound system, and even though I find the song grating, I disobey the First Rule for Mothers Shopping with their Adolescent Sons and start to bob and sing along--in public. You'd never catch me doing that in class.

Later still, I'm back on campus but instead of clawing through stacks of papers I'm climbing steps to nowhere in the Rec Center to the incomparable accompaniment of Porky Pig singing "Blue Christmas," and that's just fine with me.

In fact, today just about everything is fine with me: leftover soup and salad for supper, a half-decorated Christmas tree, a sweater two sizes too big--it's all just fine. The Texas kid is home and the Kentucky kid arrives tomorrow, and as long as the next semester stays over on the other side of Christmas, I don't intend to think about classes for at least a week. Farewell, cruel campus! It's party time.