"Holiday brain" strikes

I've mentioned this before, what I call Christmas Brain, or, if you're talking more generally about the Thanksgiving/Christmas holiday megalopolis, Holiday Brain.

It happens to me every year. When it happens varies, and it has a little bit to do with how tired I am in my day-to-day life. This year, it hit early. (I blame teaching an overload, and also having a few people as students who have either been difficult through no fault of their own(*) or have chosen to be difficult)

(* Students who just have ongoing life issues and health problems and who seem to constantly need stuff made-up or about whom I am constantly getting e-mails asking they be excused from whatever. I get that it's not their fault but it does complicate my life a bit.)

I just want to go home. And stay at home. And listen to Christmas music or watch the dumb sentimental Hallmark Christmas movies or the old Rankin-Bass specials (Apparently Mr. Rankin passed away just recently. R.I.P., those specials were a precious part of my childhood. I should probably do a blogpost about them sometime)

And I want to knit. First on gifts, but then on stuff for myself. And do silly things like make toys and work on doll clothes and just generally recapture a little hint of that good feeling I had as a kid, when I was on Christmas break, and I could just play, long fanciful hours of building Lego houses for my toy animals (while my brother, sitting beside me, built Lego cars or Lego spaceships). Or of making clothes for my stuffed toys. (I preferred stuffed animals to dolls as a child. It was only in high school, with starting to get interested in fashion and also history, that I developed more of an interest in dolls). Or of baking cookies. Or, or, or - any dozens of things. I remember making Makit and Bakit Christmas tree ornaments or "suncatchers" when I was a kid (Does anyone else remember those? Little plastic bits you put into a metal frame and then baked in the oven? I bet the fumes were really bad for you, but....we had lots of those. They were a big thing when I was a kid, and were fun and not that expensive. After a while, the plastic shapes did shrink and fall out of the frame....). All that kind of stuff.


I need to get out all my Christmas craft and Christmas nostalgia books and start looking at them.

A lot of it - the makit and bakits, the potholder loom (I should get mine out again), stuff like that - it wasn't so much about the product as it was the process. The fun of making, the fun of having something different to do. In my family, it seemed that "Christmas break" and "making crafts" just seemed to go together.

That's still true for me; one of the big times of knitting and crochet productivity for me is the Christmas season, when I'm off from school and can just relax and knit or sew or crochet or whatever.

But I want to start doing that NOW. I'm ready to be done with this semester and all the frustrations and bad-silliness that happened and take a break and sit in my nicely decorated house and listen to music and make stuff. (Well, I do get a few days after the semester is over before I go "home" for Christmas....)

I should photograph the rest of my decorations. I put the ornaments up on the tree Monday evening, and I also got out my long-neglected Gene dolls and dressed them in the most Christmassy dresses they had, and set them up next to the tree. And put out the rest of the "critters" (I can't really sit on my sofa, now, without moving some of them). And it makes my living room feel very happy and cozy to me - I have all kinds of things around me that I love and can look at.