This year two of my very good friends commissioned me to design their Christmas cards, and I had great fun with the illustration. They’ve got 3 cats, who we decided needed to be the stars of the show, as it were, all up to their usual mischief.

That’s Eddie down at the bottom playing Godzilla with the Nativity, Lucy at the top making contact with the Cthulhu tree topper, and Jessica can be seen playing impostor ornament in the middle of the tree. It’s done with ink & Copic markers, and was a lot of fun (except inking the tree, which was insanely tedious, but I love the effect so I will pretend to myself it was fun).

A Merry, Mischievous Christmas to everyone, whether or not you celebrate — it’s still an awesome excuse for a day off!

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about procrastination. It’s been a lifelong habit of mine, good or bad, and it’s funny that I interact with it on so many levels and for so many things.

For instance, showering. I love being in the shower, it’s warm and there’s water and when I’m done I’m clean and it’s awesome. And yet, every single day, it’s a battle to get myself into the shower. It makes me wonder what stuck I’ve got about showering, though I have a sneaking suspicion it’s more about what comes after. After the shower comes work, starting the day, doing the things on the to-do list. Before the shower, the day hasn’t really started, right?

And then I wonder, is making one change at a time another way of putting off my Somedays? Many of those sorts of people who supposedly know about these things say make one change at a time, concentrate on one thing. But if I’m spending up to 3 months developing one habit, what else am I putting off? Yeah, I need to floss every day, and that’s an important habit to create, but at the same time there are other habits that are equally important, but they’re for scarier goals. I want to draw every day, too, but I can put off building that habit simply by saying I’m learning to clean the catbox every day first.

There’s also “structured procrastination” (which I often find myself doing accidentally), wherein I schedule the Big Scary Thing, and then a bunch of lesser things I’ve also been putting off, and find myself barrelling through those lesser items tick-tick-tick to prove I’m busy so I don’t really have to do the Big Scary Thing just yet. Which is awesome when you do it on purpose, and slightly less awesome when it happens by accident (but still useful).

I finally got around one big procrastination step by having my darling Mum get me something really useful for Christmas this year — Havi’s Procrastination Dissolve-o-Matic. I haven’t read more than the awesome Fairy Dust yet, but I want to say that I already love it, not so much because I tried it but because she gave me permission not to do the part that was hard. There was a nifty face mudra thing with pressure points, and I started to do it but my glasses got in the way and my fingernails poked me so I stopped and read down the page — and Havi gave both permission not to do it, and an alternative for people with glasses and fingernails and other in-the-way-nesses.

And that, I think, is an important piece of the puzzle — permission to find a different way for myself, whatever that way will be.

Since I have a young and rambunctious cat, I don’t have a tree this year, so I repeated last year’s holiday decorations with a few variations. Different ornaments along the top, a better distribution of lights, and my newly cleaned-off games bookshelf gave me an opportunity to better display my complete fangirly dorkiness.

If you click the image it’ll get bigger, and you can see the nutcracker matryoshka dolls down in the lower left, the various ornaments strung along the top with the lights, and the Winnie-the-Pooh tree sculpture down the row from the nutcrackers. From left to right the ornaments are a lovely standard Christmas ball, a One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish ornament from Hallmark, a Winnie-the-Pooh Christmas ball, a Jack-in-the-Box snowman, Oogie Boogie with a wreath, a rainbow glass lightning bolt, a pewter Pooh-n-Piglet, and a blue plushie Peep a friend of mine converted to an ornament.

I also strung up some icicles to spruce up my other wall:

The items in the shadowboxes stay there all year round, though I did move the bronze roses up to the top boxes instead of the middle ones.

There’s also a few stockings hung up here and there, my Nightmare Before Christmas one is out of frame next to the shadowboxes, and I put up my set of 3 Pooh Bear ones (Pooh, Eeyore and Tigger) in the bedroom where they’ll smile at me as I drift off to sleep.

In addition, for the curious, this is the work in progress currently sitting on my easel:

All this holiday cheer is mostly for me, something to look up at when I’m working and make me smile, to remind me of all the reasons I love this time of year.

So, happy holidays to you all, whichever and whenever they are — and remember, when someone insists on a “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays,” it’s always appropriate to wish them a miserable New Year in reply.