A woman sat across the small coffee shop engaged in a phone call to which she had no idea I played the unwitting eavesdrop.

"How much longer can I safely work?" The woman's voice had the burnt, deflated sound of wind brushing past crackly dry grass. The question itself harbored the emotional remnants of arduous labor.

"Well I've still got a lot to do," she said, answering some unknown question, "I've been at this for three hours and I've still got so much to do I'm just waiting for some kind of implosion." Her tone seemed like it should be coming from a misanthropic switchboard operator.

The tale woven by the words and noises of the solely auditory aspects of the situation would have made me think the woman was copying the Bible, curing cancer, or digging a ditch in the sun. I decided to actually look directly at the wall facing speaker and more particularly, at whatever exceedingly gravitational activity she might be engaged in.

What I saw puzzled me: she sat facing a mostly empty table top with a few stacks of purchased Christmas cards, a smattering of pens, and a single white sheet of paper with one and a half columns of names listed in a ten point font.

She was filling out Christmas cards.

Now, I don't know about any of you but I really don't think that this temporary, self-induced (and apparently Holiday-obligatory) stress warrants such a level of reproachful exasperation. It's CHRISTmas, not some inescapable rerun of a Richard Simmons holiday themed workout.

Indiana Jones does less intentional self-injury than these holi-crazed Susie Homemakers and he makes a habit of brushing with death. And to top it all off he's kind of clumsy!

It's just a DAY!

And in addition, the fact that you feel that kind of obligation when contemplating Christmas as opposed to any notions of family, togetherness, or tradition means that you most likely don't really even get Christmas.

So in surmise, you're killing yourself for some socially mandated trend that you don't really even understand!

You're doing this to yourself and you're proliferating the problem in those around you who suffer from the same misguided sense of celebration.

JUST GO GET SNOWY!

GET CAROL-Y!

GET JOLLY AND WHATNOT!

Money and time are both valuable for different reasons to different people but in the end they both have to be related to you to matter in the long run.

So Merry Christmas! You're Awesome!

Now get into the season and start helping everyone realize it about themselves.