Why is it that almost everything during the holidays is bad for you? So many things endanger your health and your happiness at this time of the year. Just to name a few examples:

-Your heart. I just read a newspaper article entitled “Holidays Increase Coronary Dangers,” which claimed that December and January are the deadliest months for heart attacks. Yikes!

-Your figure. All that fat and sugar in the holidays goodies you eat and drink can take a toll. One little cup of eggnog is 350 friggin’ calories! A friend of mine just sent me a huge box of my favorite chocolates. Do you think for one second that I have the willpower to resist?

-Your safety. Driving can be treacherous. There’s the mad rush that increases traffic - everybody out shopping or going places because of the holidays. Usually the weather is bad cause it’s winter. And there are a lot more parties to attend, so you wind up driving home after dark more often.

-Your sanity. I don’t know about you, but the holidays are always crazy for me, with work deadlines, gift shopping and wrapping, decorating, family obligations, cooking and baking, parties and pot-lucks, get-togethers with friends, airline travel to visit the in-laws… The stress can be bad for your heart, your figure, and your brain.

-Your pocketbook. Retailers love this time of the year since they can move the most merchandise. But we consumers find all kinds of ways to blow our budgets.

Temptation abounds. And the holidays are when we’re the weakest. We all figure this is the time of the year we can splurge.

That extra piece of pie your mouth waters for? Sure- chow down.  That expensive pair of shoes you lust after? Go for it! The extra hour of sleep you crave, even though you know it’ll put you further behind? Hit the snooze button on the alarm clock. Better yet, turn off the dang alarm clock.

So what will cause you the most danger during the holidays? What can’t you resist, even if you know it’s bad for you? What will you be splurging on this time of year?  And if you sin a little, do you make yourself pay penance later?

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I have two olders sisters whom I admire very much. They are both accomplished and capable and they have beautiful homes and beautiful Christmas trees, and their presents are beautifully wrapped.

Then there’s me. Try as I may, I cannot wrap gifts worth a damn. I can sort of wrap gifts. If the box is square, I can make the corners neat, but forget it when it comes to bows and ribbons. My only hope is to buy the expensive, pre-tied bows with fruit and nuts sticking out of them. But I am fundamentally cheap, so I may buy one or two of those bows—the rest get curling ribbon. Curling ribbon, I can do.

Tonight, while I was wrapping gifts, I wondered what my inability to wrap well says about me. It took me all of two seconds to figure it out: It says I’m the type that can’t fold a fitted sheet, and ‘it’ is right—I cannot fold a fitted sheet to save my life! My sisters can fold them—you cannot tell their flat sheet from their fitted sheets when they are done. My fitted sheets turn into balls—I get so frustrated, I just roll it up and stuff it in the trunk where I keep linens.

It means I can’t crochet. My sisters can crochet and make wonderful throw rugs. They tried to teach me, just like they tried to teach me to fold a fitted sheet—but everything I tried turned out all wrong. One end would be longer than the other, or the edge would slant off until the piece was a triangle.

I have to face it: I don’t have the craft jean. So in the future, I am going to do what a friend of mine did: She hired a teenager to come over and wrap gifts for 5 bucks an hour. For $15, she had all her presents wrapped with about the same skill level as she possessed, but without all the cussing. Brilliant!

Are you a wrapper? Do your fitted sheets fold into perfect squares? Do you have any throw rugs lurking about with one end a foot or so shorter than the opposing end?

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My five-year-old nephew informed me over dinner on Saturday that I should go camping with him the next time the family goes. In fact, we should go immediately. Even after I explained that staying in a tent in the snow wouldn’t necessarily be a great experience, he seemed unconvinced. So then I asked him WHY I should go camping. I, you see, am an indoors person. I didn’t see snow up close until I was twelve. Oh, and I’m not fond of seafood, or the freshwater kind. Or bugs.

According to him, at the particular campsite they visit once a year, there are buildings where you can go to the bathroom. And if you don’t want to go to the bathroom, there are bushes right there with bugs and lizards in them. Apparently this is a good thing. There’s no hot water, but you can’t take a bath or a shower anyway, because there are only some toilets in the building. And one lady they met washed her hair in the lake and she had a headache for three days because the water was so, so cold.

Also, you can walk around the side of the hill and up past some trees and then down this way and climb past some rocks and there’s a tree that fell over a stream, and it’s a great fishing place. And once they went to a different place and they had to walk SO far that they had to rest, and another time Mommy rolled down a very steep cliff, but she was okay. There are no sharks in the water, and the trout taste SO good the way Mommy cooks them. Oh, and one time Daddy slipped on the tree that fell down, and he plopped right into the water.

He saw lots of squirrels and chipmunks and lizards, and one deer, and one snake. And if you see a snake, you should just freeze and then back away and blow your safety whistle. If the snake moves toward you, then you scream and run away.

To a five-year-old boy, all of this is apparently very enticing. I heard the words no hot water, eat trout, fell down cliff, and snake, and I decided that my job as an aunt would be to take him to Disneyland.

Do you like to go camping? Do you fish and eat what you catch even though it’s been snacking on worms? Have you camped in the snow – or otherwise bad weather? Or is your idea of roughing it to go without room service?

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It’s the season for giving and receiving, and I LOVE that part of Christmas. I love the smile on a person’s face when I choose the exact right gift. I love picking up the box with my name and wondering what’s inside. I love the look on my husband’s face when he sees how pleased I am with his gift and he says … (wait for it, wait for it…) “And it was a bargain at 50% off!” Somehow that makes his experience 200% better, LOL.

Recently, though, I had cause to pause and think about the gifts that don’t come in boxes or from stores. If I may quote the unforgettable Dr. Seuss …

“Maybe Christmas,” he thought, “doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas… perhaps… means a little bit more!”

So thinking outside the gift box, here are just a few of the gifts I’m thankful for: My youngest daughter got an A on her science fair project (this is huge). My oldest daughter has had some health problems this year and after some physical therapy, is no longer experiencing excruciating back pain. And I always am grateful for every year I have with my sweet husband. There was a time I wasn’t sure how many more of those I would have, so now, even though the anxiety over his health is gone, the joy of each day remains.

I’m blessed with good friends who know me and love me anyway and the priviledge of doing what I love and being able to support my family at the same time. I’m blessed with fabulous readers who gave me my first NYT bestseller this year. (Thank you SO MUCH everyone!)  And of course, I’m blessed with a vacation condo here on Mt.Oly where I can sit and chat with you Goddesses!

All gifts that don’t come from a box.

So what gifts have you received that didn’t come in a box or from a store? For you, what makes the holiday season mean “just a little bit more?”

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What would you ask him to bring you for Christmas? And while we’re at it, what’s the number one thing on your Christmas List now?

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This For Refreshment Only Sunday has gone overboard to bring you a season of good cheer! However, for those of you who have been more ‘naughty’ than ‘nice’, please do not attempt to examine the following too closely unless you’re wearing protective eye gear.

Remember the Mt. Oly Motto: Safety first.

Ok, that’s not really our motto, but I didn’t want any of you getting your eye poked out by your ‘enter’ button. Anyway, here’s your daily dose of FROS:

Ah, yesssss! It IS a Merry Christmas, isn’t it?

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… might smell as sweet, but why do we call it a rose, anyway? Why not rosal, like the Spanish? We stole plenty of other words from the Spanish—tornado and cargo and renegade—why not that one? And when we were stealing renegade, was it because the German word überläufer had too many umlauts (those double-dotted thingies)? Because that didn’t bother us when we stole plunder from the German plündern—we just hacked off the dots (and the final n, while we were at it).

And why are we missing words for the things I need to describe? Like those little pebbly things around a nipple—I couldn’t even find a medical term for them. Not that I WANT the hero laving the heroine’s sebaceous glands, but something nice like nipplets might be useful. Or breast pearls? Give me a word, people!

Then there are the obscure or obsolete words, perfectly good ones like fellowfeel (to empathize), groak (to watch people silently while they are eating, hoping they will ask you to join them), and my personal favorite, lapling (someone who enjoys resting in women’s laps). I think we have quite a few laplings in our books, and who can blame them? Laps are nice.

And don’t get me started on words that don’t mean what they ought to mean—stripling should have something to do with stripping. I’m just saying. But any stripling who strips is not as appealing as a stalwart type, as long as you remember that the latter has nothing to do with stalls and doesn’t necessarily have warts (we hope).

Yes, these are the things that keep me up at night—words and how they got to be here and why they aren’t always logical. Am I alone? Or do you too ponder the reasons for certain words? Is there an obsolete word you want brought back? Are there things you need a word for? Any weird words that have never made sense to you?

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Some books are harder to write than others. No, that’s not the secret, but it’s true. Some fall out of you. They seem to exist in some other universe and are channeled through you, full and perfect and lovely. J.R.R. Tolkien said it best when he said that he hadn’t invented Middle Earth so much as discovered it. Some books are like that. You discover them and they are good.

I love those books.

Other books have to be dragged word by word, page by page, out of you. They fight. They kick. They claw. They aren’t discovered like a beautiful, undefiled land of mystery and magic. They’re beaten into submission, pushed onto the computer screen with each jab of my fingers, until they’re held prisoner in a Word document.

I hate those books. That’s my secret. I hate the hard books. I hate them forever. They were not Fun. It did not make me happy to spend time with them every day and, because I am Me and have Standards, I’ve made it a requirement that I enjoy how I spend my days. So there.

And here’s the bigger secret: you can’t tell which books I love and which ones I hate. If the book gives you the ride you want, you’ll never know that it didn’t give me the ride I wanted. Which is as it should be. Really. But why can’t all books be easy?

Here’s my final secret: I just finished a book that was very, very difficult. This book haunted my dreams. This book gave me an eye twitch that lasted for three days. This book beat me up and left me for dead. And, no, I’ll never tell which book it was because then you might hate it too, just to be a good friend, and after all I went through I want everyone to love it.

I just want this book to stay far, far away from me. Like in another galaxy. Where it will become the source of all evil and Luke Skywalker will have to fly into the Death Star before he’s really ready…and was that story hard to write? No, don’t tell me. I love that story and I want it to stay that way.

Is this true for you? Do you have something in your life that was so difficult that you’ll never feel the same way about it again? A car that keeps breaking down? A computer that keeps freezing? A pair of pretty red shoes that rub at the heel?

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Yesterday, my friend Beth and I were Christmas shopping. We were in one of our favorite stores when we ran into a display of the sexiest red shoes ever put on this earth. We instantly decided we both had to have a pair for Christmas.

Telling our DHs would take all of the surprise out of the gift. Mentioning it ‘casually’ meant we might not get them. So, in desperation, we resorted to the time honored practice of Menage a Giftation.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it’s where she called my DH and mentioned how she’d seen me drooling over these cute shoes and thought he should know while I emailed her DH and mentioned how I’d seen her hugging one and sighing, “Ohhhh! It’s perfect for my new dress!”

Now you know — Menage A Giftation.

Don’t pretend you’ve never done it; I know you have. Here on Mt. Oly we’re all friends so we can talk about these things honestly and openly.

But, for the virgin gifters out there, here are some other time honored giftual practices:

Gift Impotency: Where you don’t know what in the heck to get someone and no amount of ‘ideas’ seems to help.

Seductagift: When you get seduced by the idea of getting a certain gift and nothing else will satisfy you.

Viagift: After failing to get someone a gift, you get them one the day after Christmas and saying you forgot to put it under the tree.

Dominate-giftrix: Your weaselly co-worker who is always trying to give the boss a better gift than you did.

Secret Santarrea: When you end up with the tacky, sequinzed hula doll in the office gift exchange.

Mastergiftation: Where you buy your own gift, wrap it and lay it under the tree because you know no one could do it better.

Mission Gifter: Only gives to charity organizations and brags about it, making you feel badly for wanting a pearl necklace.

Kama Giftra: A person who knows and uses all of the gift positions, at the right time, and in the right way, without blushing.

Have you ever been in any of these gift positions lately? Which is your favorite? Are there any I missed?

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The Goddesses extend a warm welcome to Elizabeth Boyle!

My Life as a Goddess ~

Wow! Being invited to be a goddess, even for a day, is quite an honor. But let me tell you, after the Olympic glow wears off a sudden panic sets in. I mean, what do I know about being a goddess?

So the first thing I did was make a quick study of how to be a goddess. So like Scarlett O’Hara, I woke up the next day and whipped off the sheet from the bed, wound it alluringly around my frame and strolled down the hall. Of course, I was met with my husband’s usual morning wit, when he asked, “What, is your robe in the wash again?” After explaining that no, my robe is just fine, that I am practicing being a goddess, I suspect I should have admitted that the robe was in the washer, because the look I got was the one you get from your husband when he starts looking for the wife warranty to see if he can still get his money back.

Then I was greeted by one of the little heroes, who came rocketing out of his room to tell me that his younger brother “had poops” and “couldn’t I smell them?” Well, actually, no I couldn’t. Now this was part of being a goddess I could get used to. Then I told the little offender to “Go give Daddy a big hug” and continued on with my day in the regal and supreme confidence that I was on to this goddess thing.

But the day was just beginning and after finding that my new choice of wardrobe is getting odd looks from the UPS guy, the lady in the school pick up line, and the barista at Starbucks, I am suspect my Target sheets are not going to cut it, so I send out a little private email to the goddesses about what sort of sheets I should be wearing.

Oh, heavens! Never get the goddesses going on sheets. There were debates on thread counts, Egyptian cotton (which apparently there is some rivalry between goddesses there—who knew?!) v. pima, whether a Queen sized will make you look hippy or does wearing a Twin make you look like you are trying to act 10 years younger then you really are. Now I never meant to set off this firestorm, so I thought I would cut to the chase of what mattered to me and I dropped the f-word into the debate.

Yes, ladies, I asked if flannel would be acceptable.  It is December after all. By the unholy silence of horror that followed, I had my answer. Um, I guess not. This goddess gig is tougher than I thought it would be.

So instead of trying to pass myself off as a goddess, I’ll just stick to what I do know something about reading and writing romance. Ask me anything and I’ll try to answer it.

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