tuesday's true confession: i'm a gal of contradictions

Let me just say right up front that I totally get the irony and hypocrisy that overshadows what I am about to confess. 

But I'm going to confess it anyway . . . at risk of revealing that I'm a gal of contradictions. 

So last night we went to the grocery store . . . such a "fun" family outing.  As I was walking through the chip/cracker aisle picking out pretzels for my girls, I found this:

Yep, that's right . . . holiday pretzels.  Imagine my surprise when I returned home to check the calendar and find out that is is still the first week of October.  We haven't even celebrated Halloween (or All Saints or Fall Harvest Festival or whatever you celebrate) or Thanksgiving, and the grocery stores are already carrying Christmas-themed items. 

I confess that I find this annoying.  Yep, the gal that's been creating Christmas gifts for nine months finds Christmas-themed items in the grocery store in October annoying. 

Hey . . . I told you this was going to seem hypocritical.

Let me at least try to defend myself.  

You see . . . I've been creating and crafting gifts because I'm trying to reduce my family's focus on the commercial aspects of the holidays.  I'm hoping that by giving gifts that have been labored over and loved on that my girls won't be so focused on the latest and greatest must-have gifts that are being sold on every store shelf only to be forgotten about a few months later in the bottom of the toy chest. 

At the same time, I don't want my girls focusing on Christmas so soon when there are other things to be enjoyed and holidays to be celebrated.  One of the things that I love so much about Christmas is Advent . . . the season of waiting and preparing that starts four weeks before Christmas Day.  At our house we do a lot of things to prepare ourselves . . . to learn to wait patiently for the celebration of what Christmas means in our particular faith tradition. 

So while I may have been focusing on Christmas by making homemade/handmade gifts, I don't want to actually start celebrating yet . . . I want to wait patiently, and I want my girls to learn to wait patiently.  It's hard to get them to learn that patient waiting when they see this bag of Rold Gold pretzels sitting on the grocery store shelf.  All of the sudden I'm fielding questions like:
   "Mommy, is it Christmas?"  
   "Are we getting our tree soon?" 
   "When are we going to open presents?"

(I also confess I actually bought the bag of pretzels that I'm so annoyed by .  . . and yes, I get the hypocrisy of that too.  I'm full of hypocrisy I guess.  However, I did think of an un-Christmas related food craft that I'm going to use them for in the near future.)

So . . . I guess now I'm just waiting for the Christmas decorations and ornaments to show up in stores near me, so that I can start avoiding them until the last week of November.  Ugh! 

So are you rolling your eyes at me yet?

Confess on!