For me, the build-up to Christmas is a lot like a night out drinking. It’s a lot of fun and you get caught up in the moment, but the next morning you pay dearly for throwing your cares to the wind.

I approach doing Christmas like a frat boy approaches a night out.

“Oh yeah. What the hell, buy that too! No get the bigger one! It’s Christmas!!!”

There’s no doubt we had a hell of a Christmas around here, but now that it’s all over, I have Christmas remorse. When you’re using WWE tickets as simple stocking stuffers, you probably went too far – at least in my world.

The big items under the tree this year included an LCD TV, laptops (yes, plural), power tools, dvd players, and big-ticket toys like the huge Transformers Devastator figure that’s like 6 other normals sized figures that hook together to make one huge one that my son got.

It was fun. But now I’m looking at credit card statements and it’s less fun. I’m suffering a Christmas hangover.

The weather was all anti-Christmas too. We got snow leading up to the big day, just before Christmas Eve is got all warm and rained and the snow was gone just in time for the holiday. Then, as if on cue, it started snowing again yesterday and as I look out the window, it’s spitting snow right now and everything is a lovely white. Literally, the only days of the past week or so without snow on the ground were Christmas and the days sandwiching it.

We’re also quite militant about getting rid of Christmas. I don’t understand decorating on (or before if the lights I see on houses were any indication) Thanksgiving and leaving all that crap up into the new year. Seems weird to me to spend a tenth of your life with lights and garland and the usual crap strewn about your home. Over the years we seem to have settled into a nice pattern of getting a tree and putting up decorations the first weekend in December and taking it all away the weekend after Christmas. This year that meant a nice three-week window of festive joy. Exactly enough as far as I’m concerned. Things are back to normal and I like it.

And to top it all off we’ll be spending New Year’s eve at the hotel. Seems appropriate to ring in a new decade with my wife at work being as that’s exactly how we spent it 10 years ago ruinging in the new Millennium. Yeah, we spent the biggest New Year’s celebration in 1000 years with my wife as she worked. It was literally, the two of us and our daughter (this was before our son) and the hotel maintenance guy standing in an empty lobby watching the ball drop on TV.

No big deal though. Crap like that is usually overrated and sometimes (a lot of the time, really) that’s the price you pay for being the boss. But on the flip side it’s because she’s the boss that we can have Cristmases that include TVs, laptops and event tickets as stocking stuffers.

Even after all these years, I’m still often amazed (though not surprised) at the attitudes of most (not all) hourly employees that have worked for my wife. It’s simply been too many over the years for it to be a fluke or something. The sample size is wide and vast and the results are always the same. Most of these people go out of their way to do the bare minimum and take advantage of the system any chance they get. I’m also convinced this attitude is exactly why most of these people are stuck in basic, hourly positions. Of course, they never see it that way. They’re always the first to complain about never getting a break or getting screwed. They think they have a crappy attitude because life keeps shitting on them when the truth is life keeps shitting on them because they have a crappy attitude…and like I said you see it time and time again. They just don’t see it. They think the coworker who got the promotion was just lucky. They don’t see that that person went above and beyond – actually helped out, did what was needed and picked up the slack when others dropped the ball.

That might have been a little confusing so let me put it into context. Basically, there’s no night auditor to work New Year’s even at the hotel. The weekend girl who would normally do Fri-Sun was fired last week after simply no-showing. What made it worse was that my wife and the front desk manager went out of their way to save her job after she missed so many shifts that she was supposed to be fired but gave them a sob story about hard times and her kids and such. My wife put her ass on the line to her bosses and saved the girl’s job with a stipulation that she had to show up for 30 days to have points removed…blah blah blah. Of course, my wife has been around the block a few times and suspected the worst, however a combo of a big heart and lack of potential replacements led her to not fire this girl, so she worded things in a way that if the girl started dicking around after that 30 she could fire her.

Lo and behold on days 31 and 32 the girl never showed. She got fired.

The other lady who does Mon-Thur has been at the hotel for years – long before my wife took over. She’s solid and does the work, but refuses to go beyond what she has to. She works her four days – no more. She’s also very afraid to drive in bad weather and knows that she has X number of sick days each year and uses then anytime it snows or whatever. Even more coveniently, if it’s a bad year and she uses all those days, she always manages to make it in after that. That leaves my wife with a worker who’s less than ideal, but she has absolutely no legal ground to push her out the door.

Which is probably not a bad thing as the employee pool seems to get worse and worse. I know times are supposed to be tough, but finding employees around here still isn’t easy. My wife interviewed two people after she fired the first girl I mentioned and before Christmas. The first was interested in the Audit position, but refused to work weekends. Well, the position that needs filled is the Fri-Sun one. Guess you don’t need a job that badly then. The second listed that they were interested in any position and once they found out it was Night Audit (the night shift, basically 10pm – 6am) they suddenly weren’t interested in any position anymore.

There’s a reason the first girl doesn’t have a job and the second has been a night auditor with no advancement for nearly a decade (and that the two interviewees are jobless even) – they do nothing to get ahead. They’d also most likely (in my humble experience as the husband of the bosslady for so many years) be the first to complain about how they get screwed and how lucky people like my wife are.

They just don’t see it.

People like my wife get where they are because they deserve to be there. My wife is the type of person who would take that shitty overnight job if she needed work. She’s the type who went in and covered shift when the other idiots called off on holidays. She worked her way up and became the bosslady because she got it done, not because she did just what she had to…or less as the case may be. She’s still the first to run up to the third floor and start stripping beds if housekeeping is shoort staffed for the day…and what’s funnier (and sadly, typical) is the housekeeper reaction…which is usually, “You know how to clean a room!?” Like she never did a thing in her life other than sit behind a desk…or worse, like she does nothing but sit behind a desk. It’s those people – the ones who think that – that don’t get it and probably never will. They’re convinced life is screwing them and that those who get ahead are just lucky.

Whoa. Sorry for that rant. That just came out.

The point is, my family will be spending this New Year’s Eve alone with my wife as she works…and that’s ok. It’s because of quirky little things like that that have the ability to give ourselves Christmas hangovers.

Maybe that hangover isn’t so bad after all.