Secret special ass-saving present to myself

You guys know how I get around the holidays by now.

The word you're looking for is perhaps, "CRAZY AS A SHITHOUSE RAT".  Which is five or six words depending on how you construct 'shithouse' but you all know better than to mess with me this time of year so I appreciate you letting this one slide.

I start out all maniacal when I see decorations going up in October before Halloween has even wrought havoc on our lives, I then try to ignore it all for a few weeks meanwhile begrudgingly ordering my holiday cards, doing all my shopping and pretending to myself that this is the first year in the history of mankind that I'm going to be truly 100% done with all my holiday nonsense by the first week of December, then the first week of December comes and I'm decidedly not done with all my holiday nonsense yet and HEY when did all this other stuff crop up that I have to deal with and oh yeah don't we need to get something for the garbage man and oh right I gotta bake for the neighbor gifts and do we really need a calendar made up of our year's worth of photos where Bubba licks my face while I try to get one good shot of us doing something in nature and then suddenly FUCK IT ALL I'm behind on the holiday nonsense I was trying to ignore.

This is also when I wonder WHY I always decide that I'm going to MAKE all the gifts.

Then things get kicked to the curb so that I can piece back together the shreds of my sanity before someone gets hurt.

Not pictured: The many hundreds of things that were kicked to the curb.

Someone like *everyone*.

Last year, it would appear that one of the *somethings* was the handmade napkins for my sister and cousin.

See, every year my sister, cousin and I exchange kitchen towels. Why? I have no idea aside from the fact that our moms used to do it and then they thought that it'd be a good idea for us grown-up-out-in-the-world girls to do it, too. So we do it. Because apparently sometimes I do do as I'm told.

WEIRD I KNOW.

But then a few years ago we decided that we all didn't need any more towels so we decided to exchange napkins instead.

Perhaps the *doing as we're told* was grating on us? Who knows.

And then last year I apparently thought that going and buying napkins wasn't good enough - that I needed to make these napkins.

Because OF COURSE LET'S MAKE EVERYTHING. It's not time consuming AT ALL.

So apparently I went out and bought fabric specifically for both my sister and cousin and then came home and cut out all the fabric for the napkins and then apparently the phenomenon known as WHERE DID THIS DAMN MONTH GO I CAN'T DO IT ALL I'M JUST BUYING THESE DAMN NAPKINS BECAUSE WHO HAS THIS KIND OF TIME happened and the cut fabric was stowed away never to be heard from again.

Until yesterday.

You know, yesterday when I was going to do ALL of my holiday making in one sitting because that makes total sense.

When last year's holiday mania and resulting Kicking Of Shit To The Curb turned into this year's secret special ass saving present to myself.

My ass has now been saved by pre-cut fabric. Hallelujah.

Because yesterday, as I was frantically trying to label, package, wrap, bake, customize, tag and organize this year's gifts and then realized, at the tail end of the day's franticness that I'd forgotten this napkin exchange situation, I went into my fabric stash in the closet to see if I might have *something* that I could use to make napkins for this exchange and LO AND FUCKING BEHOLD there was some fabric that would be perfect for my sister.

And - hey - that other fabric would totally match my cousin's kitchen OHWAITJUSTONESECOND these pieces of fabric are already cut out and yes this was the project that I ditched last year LET'S MAKE SOME FUCKING NAPKINS ALREADY.

Oh.

And yay! Yay I already cut out this fabric and it's already ready to have its seams pressed and run through the sewing machine and I AM 30 MINUTES FROM FINISHING THIS PROJECT I STARTED A YEAR AGO.

Oh again.

Yeah - apparently the moment when I became *over* the holidays last year happened as I was beginning to sew these napkins because I found that one of the pieces of fabric had its seams 3/4 pressed. And then nothing.

There appears to have been a moment, as I was preparing to press the fourth side of the fabric, that I threw up my  hands in the NO MORE gesture and decided I was done *doing* the holidays.

So I guess I just threw the cut fabric back in the stash, dashed off to some store (likely The Internet Store) to order some already-made-not-by-me napkins and called it a day on the whole holiday nonsense.

And I'm so glad I did because that made yesterday's I MUST GET THIS ALL DONE decree that much easier to uphold.

Done and DONE.

I mean, I didn't get every single holiday thing done, but I did get a lot of it done and that fabric, which has been taking up precious space in the craft closet for over a year, is now two sets of napkins packed into two gifts and YAY I don't have to think about that anymore.

Yay for me and for the one year that it takes me to sew eight napkins.

Imagine if I'd tried to sew something involving more than one contiguous seam? THE HORROR.