The argument

Why I should not have signed up for Holidailies:

1. I never did them back in the day when I was an “online journaller” at poundy.com, so why start now?
2. Any day now I’ll be getting editorial notes back on this novel draft I recently turned in, and my deadline for revisions will probably be January 1st.
3. Which is also when I’ll have a BUST column due. Oh, and I have to judge a book contest, too.
4. I’m not even going to be in the country for the first weekend of December. I won’t even have my laptop.
5. I don’t really live on the Internet anymore and nobody reads this site.

Why I signed up for Holidailies:

1. I felt a pang of nostalgia when I saw the list of participants—all these people who I remember from ten years ago or more, back when we called our sites online journals and those of us who didn’t have Diaryland pages had to upload each new entry by FTP. (Do I even have an FTP client on this Mac? If I find it and click on the connect button, will bats fly out of my server?
2. You don’t even know how much I can go on and on about Christmas. This time of year, it’s like Bronner’s, The Christmas Superstore inside my head. I NEED AN OUTLET.
3. I haven’t done much to really document the past couple years of my life, which have included the wedding, the book tours for The Wilder Life, the family history stuff that’s been preoccupying me for months and months now, and a lot of travel. I mean, I take photos, I scan stuff, I commit things to memory one way or another, but it feels a little unrooted and I wonder if missing something.
4. For instance, we’re going to be in England for the first time ever this month: a short trip—just a few days, and then we’re straight back to work, and it’ll all get swallowed and go through the gullet of time like nothing happened. I mean, I should do something, right?
5. The word “Holidailies” is not a real word yet it is so strangely cheering to me. It is holiday as an adjective but also somehow a plural noun, a jingly little sleigh-bell ditty giving my brain angel wings for reasons I can’t even begin to explain.

So there you have it. Don’t expect me to be all holidaily every day, but I’ll be around, okay? Ho ho HO.