1. You go to the annual Christmas concert at school with a very bad attitude and you leave feeling the same way.
2. Not even the kid who baaas like a sheep in the middle of the Twelve Days of Christmas can cheer you up.
3. You disappear with your family for two days of frolicking in a waterpark and sleeping in a hotel rather than deal with Christmas preparation.
4. Your biggest regret is that you didn’t stay in the hotel one extra night so you could have missed the annual Christmas concert.
5. You don’t put up much of a fight when your oldest daughter begs to go to the soccer party rather than the Christmas concert.
6. Instead of subjecting yourself to the dreariness of Christmas shopping, you hand all of your kids money and say “Merry Christmas – knock yourselves out.” And then you sit back and relax as they shop with reckless abandon.
7. You make no attempt to send out Christmas cards.
8. When you finally dig out the Christmas decorations, you let the kids decorate the tree and leave everything else in the boxes for another time.
9. A week later, you take the boxes back downstairs because you know you won’t get around to using anything else.
10.You dream of escaping to a tropical paradise and returning when the Christmas craziness is over.
11. Not only do you NOT do any Christmas baking, you don’t even open a cookbook for fear of the guilt it might induce. You can’t even come up with anything to make for the annual potluck at work and you consider skipping it.
12. You forgo your usual habit of buying a glossy Christmas magazine and flipping through and admiring the pictures of fancy Christmas baking, gingerbread houses, and handmade ornaments. You avoid glancing at them in the checkout aisle for fear that it might bring on that “I am SO not Martha Stewart” angst.
13. The only thing you want for Christmas is a clean house. And a basement that’s not stuck in a renovation holding pattern.