A few weeks ago, working from home, I wandered over to my bookshelf and absentmindedly picked up Elizabeth and Her German Garden.  (This is why I don’t work from home very frequently.)  The book immediately fell open to this passage:

I am very busy preparing for Christmas, but have often locked myself up in a room alone, shutting out my unfinished duties, to study the flower catalogues and make my lists of seeds and shrubs and trees for the spring.  It is a fascinating occupation, and acquires an additional charm when you know you ought to be doing something else, that Christmas is at the door, that children and servants and farm hands depend on you for their pleasure, and that, if you don’t see to the decoration of trees and house and the buying of the presents, nobody else will.  The hours fly by shut up with those catalogues and with Duty snarling on the other side of the door.  I don’t like Duty – everything in the least disagreeable is always sure to be one’s duty.  Why cannot it be my duty to make lists and plans for the dear garden?  “And so it is,” I insisted to the Man of Wrath, when he protested against what he called wasting my time upstairs.  “No,” he replied sagely; “your garden is not your Duty, because it is your Pleasure.”

Oh, Elizabeth – how well I recognize the lament that “if you don’t do it, nobody else will.”  The more things change, the more they stay the same.  (Subtract the servants and farm hands, at least for me.)  I actually love the sparkly season and making it magical for my little pod (although I will confess that addressing holiday cards is not my favorite task) but it does seem like this time of year gets busier and busier, and the call to hide away and attend to pure enjoyment is undeniably alluring.  Between buying and wrapping gifts (and keeping track of it all), mailing cards, unpacking ornaments, and planning all the seasonal fun I like to arrange for my family – not to mention the rush to wrap up matters and finish projects at work before the end of the year – the whirl seems endless, and it’s exhausting.  Maybe I should take a leaf out of Elizabeth’s book and hide away with a seed catalog.