A Holiday Story of Better Late Then Never

Maybe it’s me, but I really think that procrastination must be genetic.  I have evidence of a chromosomal cause; it runs in my family.  My mother has many wonderful qualities, but punctuality is not one of them.  It is not unusual to have several birthday packages arrive in one large box – one that covers the birthdays from March thru August.  And arrives in October.  My sister once sent us “winter gifts” in February.  They were nicely packaged in snowman wrapping paper, with a note that said that these most certainly were NOT late Christmas gifts, but rather they were timely “winter gifts”.  The winter-gifting season, she explained, is rather loosely held to be somewhere between January and March. 

As you can see, the family procrastination gene is linked to a rather creative rationalization gene. 

Much as I hate to admit this, I can top the winter gifts…..  One year when the kids were small, I bought Christmas cards featuring a beautiful dove and a simple message wishing peace for the holidays.  I signed all our names, and enclosed labeled photos of the kids in their Christmas finery.  Then I hand-wrote an individual note in every last one of the 63 cards.  Well, understandably, by this time, I was exhausted.  Too exhausted to actually mail them. 

Those cards sat on my desk all through the holidays and into January.  Every time I passed, they screamed at me, “Loser!”  Then I had a brainstorm.  Well, it was more of a cerebral squall, but I still thought it was a great idea.  I checked the message inside the cards.  It read, “Wishing you peace for the holidays.”  It didn’t say WHICH holiday.  So I drew little hearts around the dove, and decided to send them off for Valentine’s Day.  It could be funny.  People would understand.  I mean, I had small children.  I worked.  I was busy.

But I STILL didn’t send them.  I was then obliged to add some shamrocks.  And yet there they sat, still.  It wasn’t until the dove laid eggs that I finally got those things mailed.  Eggs, as in Easter eggs.  I enclosed the Christmas photos – what else was I going to do with them?  And I wrote a really awful poem that attempted to both explain and excuse the lateness.

The bad poetry is apparently my own personal mutation of the creative rationalization gene.  This mutation drives me to write bad poems, in the misguided belief that poorly rhymed phrases will absolve me more effectively than plain old apologetic prose.

It would, of course, be easier and less poetically painful to just stop the procrastination, but who am I to work against the dictates of DNA?