I love to wrap Christmas presents. I mean, love it.

But, I wish someone would explain to me how it is possible to lose an ink pen and a roll of scotch tape if you haven’t moved from the spot in two hours.

I had every intention of pulling out that Christmas tree Thanksgiving Day, just so I could get a head start on wrapping the few gifts that I’d managed to collect. That didn’t work out, so it was another week and a half before the project was started.

I made the two little ones drag the five-foot box containing the seven-foot tree from the shed, and that was entertaining in itself.

It took a good hour to straighten the branches and get the tree at least somewhat straight. Then, came the process of decorating. That was fun until a fight broke out over who would put what where. Another hour later, it was done.

“You know, that’d look a lot better with something under it,” the middle one said, and I wanted to throttle her. Or I did until I realized that I was already stressing myself out about the holidays – and December had barely begun.

I had to take a deep breath and tell myself to chill out.

I bet a lot of us struggle with that each year – the need to create a perfect Christmas – and I know I do it to myself.

The Christmas season should be about joy. After all it represents everything I love – home, family, thoughtfulness, giving and the like.

After giving it a good deal of thought, I decided that I would do a few things to ensure my holiday happiness.

First, I will bake up that cookie dough in the fridge – test it out for Santa.

I will also wrap all the Christmas presents – for everyone in my house. Myself included. It makes me very happy to do that.

One year, I left Mr. Man in charge of wrapping and came home to find some things “wrapped” in Walmart bags. He had, however, thoughtfully, tied the handles into a bow. I nearly had a stroke.

Two, I will not be giving perfume as a gift. Last year, Mom got a very expensive bottle of perfume from her darling girls – until it began to leak through the wrapped package. Luckily, I was able to exchange but not before the entire house reeked.

Thirdly, forget the outside Christmas lights. As long as I have money to buy gas, we’ll drive up and down the neighborhood before I wrestle through that. I barely survived putting up the Christmas tree. There’s no way I’d make it through a second decorating phase.

Then, when my sanity begins to hitch a ride on Santa’s sleigh, I will resort back to the cookie dough. After all, it really shouldn’t go to waste, should it?