How Lazy People Can Effectively Create Holiday Cheer

SpringJoy Blog

This is so easy, it makes me want to get 8 more dogs and 8 more sweaters. For any holiday, for any occasion, you can instantly spice up your life by getting your dog a sweater. Sometimes I see crazy ladies at the dog park with three dogs, all in sweaters, and my first thought ishey this is L.A., isnt your dog going to be kind of hot? But then my second thought isoh, okay, I get it! You needed cheer in your life.

2) Paint your nails

You and your significant other can go get a $10 manicure that includes cheerful, holiday colors! I mean, look at this! How could you have a bad, or non-festive day when every time you pick up the phone or write an email you see THESE? I mean, having a festive manicure is like having a festive wreath made out of toothpicks that you can TAKE WITH YOU wherever you go, all day long. I used to think grocery store checkout ladies with giant nails were crazy, but now I get it. They probably have to deal with terrible people all daymight as well have some fun nails.

3) Buy a large, cheerful object for your living room

Get a tree, or some other appropriate monument to whatever holiday is in question. I never thought this was important, but I realize now that we are all visual creatures who tend to disbelieve that something is real unless we have proof. My fiancee and I put this tree up, and now when I see it everyday, I have evidence to believe in the miracle of Christmas. And by miracle of Christmas, I of course mean the existence of elves.

This used to just be a living room now it is a living room with a TREE.

4) Hang weird things around that remind you of home

Because home reminds you of when you had a big family that spread holiday cheer like wildfire. At first, I thought it was weird when my fiancee tried to hang this large, wooden sign on our tree. Clearly, this sign is meant to be hung over a ponys stable (a pony named little buckaroo) or over a childs bed. But she is from Texas, and she is a buckaroo, and this sign reminds her of home, so she put it on our tree and, even though it takes up half of the tree, I totally get it and Im glad it is there. 

Other ideas for things you can hang on the tree/around the house to remind you of family:

1) family photos, preferably glamour shots from when you and your mom dressed alike:

2) a scarf that your grandma knit you (possible garland?)

3) cards that your family sends

4) chocolates or snacks that remind you of your family (my grandparents used to twist chocolates in decorative foil and hang them on the tree, but they only lasted seconds before being eaten)

So, in conclusion, you dont have to be crafty to have cheer in your life. This is great news. Now go put chachkas all around your living room and on your fake tree from Targetand enjoy!

Chores: Are they real?

SpringJoy Blog

Here is an extremely cute fact about my fiancee: she calls cleaning and all of the other stuff you do around the house chores. It gets me every time she says itits like I dont even see her anymore, I just see a little kid sweeping steadily with a broom on the front porch of some old, southern house as the sun is creeping down behind the trees. Or I see a little kid in a rain jacket that just picked a pail of dewy berries for dinner and is running up the hill to her house to dutifully turn them over to the family, and to ask if there are any other chores she can help with.

The word chores makes me think of childhood. I had them when I was little. My brother and I made a list at some point of all of the things we needed to do and who was supposed to do them. There was also a mental list of who last rode shotgun in the car (because obviously that is super exciting and we needed to alternate to make life more fair).

At camp where I spent every summer between ages 9 and 16, we always had a chore chart on the back of our cabin door that helped keep track of who did what so that we all got a new chore every day. The favorite chore was emptying the trash (all you had to do was take a small trash can to a larger trash can and dump it). The least favorite was dewdrop which is what we called the giant, shared bathroom. Sometimes you had to do sinks, or toilets, or floor in there I dont remember exactly how it worked I just know it was really gross. One of the funniest chores was rafters, which involved making sure the towels drying on the rafters were aligned neatly and, in fact, needed to be drying. If you had a towel up there that did not need to be drying (aka it was already dry), you would automatically get an X. Xs were bad. The more you got, the less chance you had of winning honor cabin. Winning honor cabin was always a really big deal and super exciting, but I cannot for the life of me remember why. All I remember was that you got a plaque to hang on the door of your cabin for one week. Am I crazy or does it seem like getting an X is not that big of a deal if the only thing it prevents you from doing is borrowing a plaque? But at the time, you could not have convinced me to stop caring about the devastating fear of getting an X. Chores were important, and we all wanted to be good at them.

My question now as an adult is, do chores exist? If no one tells me to do something, is it still a real chore? For example, I know that a space in which humans live has to be cleaned from time to time, but if there is no chart and no assignment and no Xs to be given, I cant get myself to think of it is a chore. In my mind,  chore means something you have to do by a deadline because someone is making you; whereas now, at age 28, cleaning my living space is supposedly something I should want to do, for fear of turning into a dusty cave monster.

Well, when it comes to cleaning stuff, I neither have to do it nor want to do it. My poor fiancee runs around the house cleaning and telling me she is almost done with the chores and I cant understand why she is doing it. Its not that I want to live like a slob; here is what I want: I want the house to be cleaned on the sly. I want to exert my freedom as an adult human by just sort of cleaning sneakily when I feel like it and in the middle of doing something else. Maybe I am looking out the window and I happen to start spraying it with Windex, for example. If I do that, I own the window, and the window doesnt own me.

This difference in opinion about cleaning styles has sometimes caused tension in our shared living space. While my fiancee wants to have an entire chore Saturday, I want to pretend our apartment is cleaned by tiny elves while we are away or while we are reading a magazine. I promise you that I do help clean the houseyou just wont know when or how or in what way I am doing it. It will always be a mystery. Except when I forget and there are piles of clothes everywhere; in that case, there will be no mystery. You will know that I forgot to trick myself into secretly cleaning. I will get an X from no one. I will know that my room does not get honor cabin this week

How Skylar spends her time in #hashtag S2

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