Haunted By the Holiday Spirit

It's the end of the Thanksgiving weekend. The leftovers are stowed in the fridge, the Christmas tree is up and decorated and safely out of reach of wagging dog tails, the house is relatively clean, and I'm about as tired as a blonde joke. Seriously, it's going to be an early bedtime tonight.

Before I turn in, though, I just wanted to take a minute to give thanks here, publicly, for some of the many things for which I'm grateful. So here goes, in no particular order:

• Friends, family, and pets
• The best job in the universe
• The best readers in the universe
• My favorite sports team finally won a game after 3 losses (Let's go Red Wings!!!)
• My mother's stuffing recipe could makes angels weep in jealousy, and I get credit every year for recreating it at thanksgiving dinner
• We found the perfect tree in about three and a half minutes at the tree lot, and the people there installed it on the stand for us
• I've finalized my travel arrangements to head back East to visit my family over the holidays
• Ghirardelli dark chocolate peppermint bark
• Champagne, and those darling monks who invented it
• Cappuccino, and etc. (see above)
• The sky is scheduled to stay clear and sunny for at least another three or four days
• My dog loves me, even though he thinks I'm the most boring human on the face of the earth
• My horse is no longer trying to kill me on a regular basis

See? That's a good bit to be thankful for, and that's just the list that came up off the top of my head. Now, if I can just keep that all in mind as I gear up to finish a book and get all of my Christmas shopping done, maybe I'll be able to stay sane into 2010!

Fingers crossed.