That time of year
Dec. 22nd, 2011 11:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumI can relax now. I don't have to work until well after Christmas Day. Since I've been at work more than eight hours a day for the past five days, and working 4-5 days out of every seven for the past month... I am glad.
Because work means being on my feet if I'm on the floor. Add in the trips down the 21 steps to the stockroom (which are a bit fewer, for me, in the days before Christmas, because I am chained to the knife counter and we have all our overstock in arms reach) and this is a busy time.
I've spent the past couple of days training someone new (whom I think is being kept, or he'd not have been told to shadow me for a couple of day) which is nice, but it's being done while dozens of people come up to ask questions. Add that to step out from behind the island of calm that selling 60 knives in seven hours is, means to be bouncing from one person to another like a ping-pong ball (because you can't finish helping one person without someone else demanding assistance; sometimes in the middle of answering a question for the other person), and forty hours of retail is mind-numbing in the extreme.
But I am lucky. I celebrate the entire 12 days of Christmas, so my personal holiday will be much quieter than that which people who are looking to just the single day of climax to a secular season of pressure tend to get.
I have to say that three years of retail prior to Christmas is not the best thing for one's Christmas spirit. At least the music in my shop hasn't been all seasonal, all the time; which is mostly a problem because one or two songs are bothersome in single doses, and become repulsive in massive repetition: Santa should NOT do the Mambo, just sayin').
I like Christmas. I even value the secular nature of it. The sense of peace, and comfort to the rest of humanity it manages to infuse to people. But I am glad I don't wrap it all into one orgy of gifting and being happy.
Dickens summed it up so very well in "A Christmas Carol".
"Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"
It held up its chain at arm's length, as if that were the cause of all its unavailing grief, and flung it heavily upon the ground again.
"At this time of the rolling year," the spectre said "I suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode! Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me!"
We are our brother's keepers, and in this season of the year, in the middle of the sales, and the pressure to buy, we remember it. And that makes me glad.
God Bless us, everyone.
Because work means being on my feet if I'm on the floor. Add in the trips down the 21 steps to the stockroom (which are a bit fewer, for me, in the days before Christmas, because I am chained to the knife counter and we have all our overstock in arms reach) and this is a busy time.
I've spent the past couple of days training someone new (whom I think is being kept, or he'd not have been told to shadow me for a couple of day) which is nice, but it's being done while dozens of people come up to ask questions. Add that to step out from behind the island of calm that selling 60 knives in seven hours is, means to be bouncing from one person to another like a ping-pong ball (because you can't finish helping one person without someone else demanding assistance; sometimes in the middle of answering a question for the other person), and forty hours of retail is mind-numbing in the extreme.
But I am lucky. I celebrate the entire 12 days of Christmas, so my personal holiday will be much quieter than that which people who are looking to just the single day of climax to a secular season of pressure tend to get.
I have to say that three years of retail prior to Christmas is not the best thing for one's Christmas spirit. At least the music in my shop hasn't been all seasonal, all the time; which is mostly a problem because one or two songs are bothersome in single doses, and become repulsive in massive repetition: Santa should NOT do the Mambo, just sayin').
I like Christmas. I even value the secular nature of it. The sense of peace, and comfort to the rest of humanity it manages to infuse to people. But I am glad I don't wrap it all into one orgy of gifting and being happy.
Dickens summed it up so very well in "A Christmas Carol".
"Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"
It held up its chain at arm's length, as if that were the cause of all its unavailing grief, and flung it heavily upon the ground again.
"At this time of the rolling year," the spectre said "I suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode! Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me!"
We are our brother's keepers, and in this season of the year, in the middle of the sales, and the pressure to buy, we remember it. And that makes me glad.
God Bless us, everyone.
