I am picking lint off of my keyboard; that is how frustrated I feel this morning. The words are waiting to dance an essay and they are dependent on me to get the ball rolling.

Where do I start when there is no one to give me a cue?

Sigh. Well, I am feeling the weight of holiday stress. “On the thirteenth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me….increased blood pressure and a partridge just as fat as me.”

I exaggerate to make a point, but I forget what it was. The days flow into each other as the frustrations mount.

I have clumsily wrapped a few gifts, obsessed about my waist line and succumbed to a feeling of dismay. “On the fourteenth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me….static electricity and hair that stood straight up and a tear that suddenly came to me.”

The dashed hopes of Christmas the reindeer brought to me and a partridge living rent-free.

So I quit counting and took a nap.

Visions of sugar plums did not dance in my head, but I did sense a case of the blues.

On the fifteenth day of Christmas, I got a new calendar. It is obvious that the current one was maddeningly inaccurate.

On the sixteenth day of Christmas, I tore up the new calendar, ate an entire figgy pudding and strangled a random elf. Too damn many of them.

Vicki Woodyard