National Week Off

I made my resolution and I’m sticking to it. For the rest of the week, if I can’t identify every ingredient that went into it, I’m not eating it. Yes, Secret Sauce qualifies as an identified ingredient as long as it’s served with pickle, lettuce, onion, cheese on a sesame seed bun.

I’m in post-Christmas potluck recovery mode and starting to feel a bit better with diminishing danger of relapsing into a calico bean overdose, thank you.

It’s finally the downhill side of the holiday season. We got the shepherds to Bethlehem for one more year and the Wise Men aren’t far behind. The partridge is in the pear tree, the herald angels harked and as long as I can hit the snooze button a couple of extra times in the morning, all’s right with the world that’s gonna be right for the immediate future.

We’re into the holiday hiatus, the week-long interregnum between Silent Night and the Rose Bowl parade. Across the country, folks are kicking back a bit while the charge cards cool and the carton of eggnog in the back of the refrigerator quietly goes bad. Families are getting reacquainted after six weeks of holiday concerts, holiday programs, holiday hockey tournaments and other fun-filled family activities and are now discovering the youngest child has replaced a couple of teeth, Dad’s put on 10 pounds and taken up Scientology. Pine needles are working their way into the carpet and the backyard is all a-glitter with tinsel the dog ate off the tree. For most of us, Jan. 2 is a day we’re looking forward to.

Meanwhile, we’re temporarily a nation of slackers.

There aren’t enough days between the holidays to make buckling down worth the effort, so we’re all marking time between Christmas and New Years until the cold day in January when really have to get back to work. It’s the rarest drudge, bootlicker or dedicated company-man who’s not sleeping a little later, slipping out a little earlier, lunching a little longer and losing count of his coffee breaks. The ambitious among us are just going through the motions while the rest rest motionless, staring at screensavers through closed eyes while the boss soaks up the sun off the coast of Costa Rica. Truth be told, from the 26th to the 31st the lot of us turn into lackadaisical lollygaggers putting in a slapdash performance when we bother to perform at all. Considering the condition of the burger I was served the other day, we’d all be better off if we all took the whole week off.

Heck, anybody with seniority and vacation days to burn made it off the clock days before Santa’s sleigh was cleared for takeoff and won’t be back in until the New Year’s baby hits puberty. Healthy folks are drawing serious sick days lining up at the docs to cure what might ail them before they have to pay off another year’s deductible. If the folks who do show up aren’t on the phone trying to line up a last minute tax shelter, they’re on the phone trying to line up a date for New Years Eve. If folks show up for work or not, it’s the National Week Off we may as well make it official.

From Dec. 23 to Jan. 2 showing up for work would be an optional thing for anybody except dairy farmers and Kwik Trip clerks. For nine days we’d shut down the world and catch up on our sleep. There’d finally be time to clean out our closets. We could defrost the freezer and run our old bank statements through the paper shredder. There would be time to hook up the home theater system we got for Christmas. There’d be time to sleep late and time to make soup. Then all across the country, people would be starting the new year well rested, with clean cupboards and all the laundry neatly folded and put away.

It might not be peace on earth, but it would be a start.