The Death of Christmas

Yesterday I took down my Christmas tree.  The poor pitiful future pile of mulch, stripped of all its Christmas glory, dripping pine needles and leaving my hands covered in sap signified the end of one of the nicest Christmas vacations I have had since I was a kid.  It was quite sad.

(  It is amazing how bad a Christmas tree can look after you have taken all the lights and decorations off of it.  )

This vacation was different from ones in the past in that I actually got to celebrate it- and it was awesome!  I have been working in restaurants (and before that, retail - equally less generous with holiday off time) and had become used to bargaining for which holiday I wanted off the most, playing politics with managers to try and get enough time to travel home in time for Christmas dinner (or Thanksgiving's, if that was the holiday I was able to procure).

No more!

I'm a substitute teacher, so I get the same vacation time as a little child!  And it's wonderful!

I utterly packed my vacation time to the brim.

And now it is time to go back to work.  I picked up a job using our online scheduling system called Subfinder at about 1:00 A.M. this morning, and would have canceled it today if I hadn't woken up past the cancellation deadline this morning.  The perk about being a sub is that I really can work whenever I want, but need to find the discipline  on mornings like these, after a two week long joyous vacation with snow and great food and travel and buffalo hunts to get back in the car and make the long early morning drive to a middle school in my hometown.