{"id":1953,"date":"2012-11-22T09:16:01","date_gmt":"2012-11-22T14:16:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/?p=1953"},"modified":"2012-11-22T09:54:37","modified_gmt":"2012-11-22T14:54:37","slug":"ruminations-on-the-holidays-and-a-retail-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/?p=1953","title":{"rendered":"Ruminations on the Holidays and a Retail Life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This year I received a pin marking my 15th year working for my company. How lucky am I to have a job I love for all of these years? It&#8217;s just around this time of year &#8211; working in a store is tough. Look &#8211; if I won the lottery today I&#8217;d still work through the holiday season rather than leave my dear colleagues in the lurch. <em>But<\/em>\u00a0I would be joyous &#8211; not only because of my great winnings (I have a rich fantasy life) but because, it would be my last. Fifteen years of my 17 year old daughter&#8217;s life around the holidays, have been experienced through the prism of me in retail insanity. I mostly come home exhausted and full of bah-hum-bug, a grouchy cookie baker, reluctant to listen to yet more Christmas music. Poor kid.<\/p>\n<p>Don&#8217;t get me wrong &#8212; there are parts of the madness I love. It&#8217;s great to have the bookstore bustling with energy, readers delighting in discovering new books. What I don&#8217;t enjoy is the sense of exaggerated emergency that seems to linger like a frost from &#8216;Black Friday&#8217; until New Year&#8217;s. It&#8217;s like everyone has imbibed too much coffee. This year, that amped-up feeling seems even more intense around here because of Sandy the hurricane, everyone is scrambling, anxiety twisting our gut.<\/p>\n<p>I hate that feeling. And I wonder why I am susceptible to it? I have lived through real emergencies and know to my core that not being able to get the right book on time hardly counts as one. This manic-mode is not necessary, nor even helpful &#8211; yet, here I go again.<\/p>\n<p>But not yet. Today is Thanksgiving and &#8212; I do give thanks. After roasting vegetables, making another pie, stuffing, cranberry sauce and green beans, the three of us will walk across the street to celebrate with our dear friends. I&#8217;ll do my best to hang on to the sweetness of this shared celebration &#8211; to seize this day as the start of a busy, but mellow and joyous holiday season. Because who knows &#8211; I still might win the lottery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This year I received a pin marking my 15th year working for my company. How lucky am I to have a job I love for all of these years? It&#8217;s just around this time of year &#8211; working in a store is tough. Look &#8211; if I won the lottery today I&#8217;d still work through &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/?p=1953\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Ruminations on the Holidays and a Retail Life<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[14,16,50,35,34,31,49,41,19,28],"class_list":["post-1953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-seasonal-musings","tag-books","tag-food","tag-holidays","tag-learning-to-relax","tag-lottery","tag-neighborhood","tag-retail","tag-seasons","tag-time","tag-work"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pPzTS-vv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1953"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1953\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1963,"href":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1953\/revisions\/1963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/triciatierneyblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}