"Christmas Comes Around Every Year"

The week before Christmas is always mass chaos for me. Between parties, church activities, shopping and cleaning, I can feel the dark feelings of desperation approaching. It doesn't help that I've been fighting some sort of bug that keeps me coughing. Last night was our annual Turley Sister's Christmas party. It started when my Grandma Fern hosted the two families who lived here to come to her little house on 2nd Ave. in Mesa. We would eat and then have a little program with songs and talks. It was also a tradition to read a story called "Turkey Trot" Grandma found when she worked as a librarian. It's about a little black family who are so poor that the Mom tells them Santa doesn't come because he's white. It ends up being quite a cute story but tends to run a little long, so my sister has condensed it for the sake of time and the attention span of the great-grand kids now.  We usually have around a hundred people but last night was different. With Len and Julie on a mission, none of their family came and a lot of cousins on the other side were missing too. Dad and my brother-in-law Larry are both fighting a battle for their lives, so it put a damper on the evening. I told Rich the other day that I feel the tides are a changing. The world is different. The violence that we inflict on our brothers and sisters seems to be increasing and I see sadness everywhere. When I left the shopping center on Thursday there was a mother with a child asleep in a stroller standing at the exit with a sign asking for money. I handed her a couple of dollars and was hoping she wasn't a scam artist. I have felt a lot lately that this isn't the way life is suppose to be. Things should be perfect with butterflies, unicorns and M & M's everywhere. I called a friend of ours the other day to thank him for a gift he sent home for me with Rich. His wife passed away on my birthday last May. They never had any children, hence no grandchildren. As I was telling him about my feelings of being overworked and overwhelmed he said, "well you know Teri, it comes around every year." That has stuck in my mind since I talked to him, it does come around every and I seem to survive it, so I guess this year won't be any different. Just a couple more days and hopefully my cold will be gone and I can get back to getting more than five hours of sleep, and then it will be summer before we know it.