Christmas is dead

As it goes with our kind of business, Christmas is a very busy time of year. While a lot of our doggies apparently take the holidays off, the kitty cats that we sit for come out of the woodwork for the period between Dec 15 and Jan 8. Because I am a super great person and love my girls, and also don't feel like paying time and a half to them when I have to be around anyway, I will be the only one working on Christmas Day and New Year's Day. Now, New year's Day is not so bad, as per the schedule I have as of today (I have at least one addition per day these days). But Christmas. Christmas is dead.

I have 20 visits scheduled that day so far. Each visit is 30 minutes. plus travel time in between. Two of the visits are actually an hour long because it's a diabetic cat who needs to eat all of his food before getting his insulin, and he likes to take his sweet old time. If you calculate that out, it's about 15.5 hours of work. With no breaks for meals. Luckily SB has offered to help me do some of them, but I think this means I won't be cooking a big Christmas dinner.

Since I've been quite concentrated on getting the business ready for the holiday, I am not exactly in a Christmas-y mood. Last weekend SB said:
"Do you feel like getting our tree this weekend?"
"no"
"yeah, i guess it's too early."
"I don't really think I want a tree."

Silence and inner tears on his part.