Well, Christmas is over and it’s just a few days until we begin the new year 2008.

This morning I started dismantling some of the Christmas decorations and stored them in cardboard boxes until next year. Christmas dinner leftovers crowd the shelves of my new refrigerator. There’s leftover turkey, smoked ham, whole sweet corn, cornbread dressing, turkey gravy,  cranberry salad, five cup salad and apple pie. It was a good Christmas with relatives and friends, nine of us in all.

Somehow today I’m having postmartem feelings now that it’s all over. There was such a lot to do before Christmas with all the preparations of decorating, shopping, buying and wrapping gifts, cooking. Now that it’s over, I feel letdown. A sadness has crept into my day, leaving me lonely and blue. The glitter is gone.

The old thoughts that were pushed aside by the busyness of Christmas are surfacing; those issues and feelings that haven’t been properly dealth with. You know how it is with something that is bothering you. You can gloss it over and cover it with activities, but eventually your mind returns to that niggling bothersome reality

 There’s nothing you can change. It is all consuming and clings like static in your mind

What is she talking about, some of you will say.  Others already know and relate.

Regardless, it is a new year and that brings a promise. It brings a promise of a happy beginning and a happy ending and better times within.
God is in control.

I will not procrastinate

I will not procrastinate.

That’s my New Year’s resolution. That will pretty well take care of the better part of 2008.

I made the resolution after I found myself locked out of my car on a cold windy afternoon, two days before Christmas. If I had not procrastinated, I would have been able to open the door with my spare key. But no, the spare key was locked in the car and the car was locked tight.

For some time, I’d been telling myself that I needed to separate my original car keys and my spare key, just in case. I had made a decision that I wouldn’t keep all my “eggs” in one basket. But I had put off doing that.

It happened this way: I had gone to a friend’s house to deliver a couple of gifts. I did, then found myself locked out of my car. Inside the car, my purse lay on the passenger seat. Inside the purse was my car key, my spare key, my house key and my spare house key. And I was shivering.

Mr. Baker, a nice neighbor, woke up from his nap and called a locksmith for me. The nice locksmith arrived 15 minutes later.

He was a motorcycle guy but he was a nice one. Most importantly, he knew how to unlock a locked vehicle. He was sympathetic too.

He even admitted he had been locked out of his own vehicle on two occasions. Then, just to make me feel better, he told how he has unlocked the same car for the same woman, three times.

On the second opening, he suggested to the woman that she might want to give her spare key to her mother so that if it happened again, she could get her mother to unlock the car.

The woman said she would.

Not long after that, the locksmith got another call. The woman and her mother were standing outside the locked car when he got there.

“I thought you were going to give your mother a key in case you ever locked yourself out again,” the locksmith said.

“I did,” the woman said. She pointed inside the car where two purses sat side by side.

“The key’s in her purse,” the daughter said.

 I remember another place, another time when I locked myself out of a car. My friend and I, and another couple, had made plans to go to a concert in a nearby town. We made arrangements to meet at my friend’s house and we would all ride together in one car.

I arrived right on time and slammed the car door. It was then I realized that my purse with concert ticket was still inside the car. It was locked tight, like the proverbial drum. There wasn’t time to hitch a ride back to my hometown and get my spare key. Naturally, it was cold as ice.

My friend called a locksmith who was sick in bed with the flu.

“Give me a few minutes and I’ll be there,” the locksmith said.

And he was. There must be a special place in heaven for locksmiths.

So that’s my resolution……no more putting things off. I will not procrastinate.

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