Pre-Christmas Activities

I had a couple of days when I was not 100% absorbed by work crises and mailing cookies, which gave me some chances to enjoy Christmas activities.

I went to Harold Washington Library to listen to a midday Brass Christmas Concert (the quality was rather low, but I wanted to support a community event.

I went to the Christkindle Market “with purpose” and had a hot cider in a souvenir mug, bought more roasted nuts, spiced teas, some small gifts, and some sweets just for myself (nobody except for Boris likes marzipans the way I do!)

I had tickets for a Christmas Concert at the CSO on Friday (I planned to go with Nadia, but then it appeared to be more convenient to go with Nadia on December 23. I decided not to return the December 20 tickets but to go with my mom, especially because I had to skip one of her concerts in October when I went to Greece. After some hesitations, I also booked the Thomas Club dinner, mostly because of their service level but because I knew there would be something my mom would enjoy. I felt bad that i didn’t give her enough of my time in the past several weeks (I saw her often, but each time for a short period and with some practical purpose).

It ended up being a medium-scale disaster because she was silent for the first 30 or 40 minutes of our dinner and then said: “You will let me know how much it costs.” I said – no, I won’t because I already told her multiple times that I was not going to tell her. She always reacts, “Oh, what a horror, how expensive!” And I do not want to hear it. Apparently, she forgot that we made this deal and kept insisting, and then she went into a dead silence and remained there for the rest of the evening. The funny thing was that I knew that she enjoyed the performance, but she kept her answers on the yes/no level.

It took me a lot of effort to keep myself in a positive mood. Retrospectively, I should have told her the price and just let her rant because regardless of what I do or say, she finds reasons to be unhappy, but I didn’t. I need to do a better job of internalizing the fact that she will never be happy because she doesn’t want to and that all her past behavior never went away and never will. Regardless of her efforts, the winter menu was great, a new spicy cocktail was amazing, and the concert was outstanding!

Also, I found last year’s gingerbread cookies, which Lena didn’t have time to decorate, and I decorated all of them! And I decorated almost all of the remaining sugar cookies because I could not stand them being “unused.”

Also, I drank a lot of hot chocolate from my “Hotel Chocolate” Advent calendar and munched on roasted nuts from the Christkindle Market and old-fashioned hard candy. And I felt very good each time I was coming back home.