I’m participating, this year, in three simultaneous daily projects related to the holiday season.

On Twitter, I’m doing #MusicAdvent, which involves sharing a youtube music video every day for the first 25 days of December. Every year there’s a theme, and this year it’s super-easy, just covers. I’ve been participating for years, but for some reason, this is the first time it occurred to me to create my playlist before the first day, which has made my life a lot easier.

On my blog, MissMeliss.com (where you’re reading this) I’m participating in Holidailies, which involves writing every day from December 1st – January 1st. I’m two days behind at the moment, though I will catch up, because what I thought was a severe sinus infection turned out to be pneumonia with a side of pleurisy. I have a z-pack and steroids, but steroids really mess me up – I haven’t been sleeping, I’m edgy, and when I took the pill on Friday, it sent me from zero to acute migraine with no aura in about ten minutes (the weather didn’t help) and then I had to take Imitrex, which basically flattens me. There was no way I was going to write. I didn’t have enough brain.

That leads to my third project this month, which is happening on my podcast – you can find out about that at BathtubMermaid.com  the Dog Days of Advent, which is flexible, in that some people do twenty-four or twenty-five episodes, some people do twelve, some people count down to Christmas, and some people span it. It’s from the same community as the Dog Days of Podcast that I’ve been doing every August for several years now. Earlier in the week, before I knew how sick I was, I’d lost my voice, and another participant offered to read for me, but I didn’t have enough pre-written to get an episode in on Saturday.

My doctor told me that even writing and recording in bed was more than she wanted me to do, but except for chills and a fever than comes and goes, I’ve mostly just been off-kilter, but Saturday was spent rearranging furniture in four rooms of our house, and between the pneumonia, which has left me too winded to exercise, and the physical work, I managed to push my recently-reconstructed knee too hard. It’s hurting in a way it hasn’t since right after surgery, but it feels stable. I suspect today, Sunday, will be spent in extremely sedentary activities like watching Hallmark Christmas movies in bed.

But enough whining.

The cleaning and rearranging, the various December projects, even the medications I’m on, all share a common theme: counting down. The cleaning is part of counting down to my mother’s arrival in about ten days. The pills are me counting down until I feel better. And the projects are counting down to Christmas, which still and always sends me into a mood of childlike delight, and the end of the year.

And in the midst of all of it, I open doors on my advent calendar – a tradition my godmother has been sharing with me for as long as I can remember. We don’t do chocolate or cheese or tea in our calendars. Nor do we have cool treasure boxes of toys and trinkets for each day. Sometimes I wish we did that, but mostly, I like the simplicity of the oversized greeting card with the tiny doors on the front.

Counting down seems to be a human need. We cross off days, check completed items off our to-do lists, and feel the every-present ticking of time.