If Christmas only comes once a year,

mine is over and done with.

I just had Christmas carolers come sing at my door!! HA!

This week is Spirit Week at my school. For those of you who, like me, had a public school education and don't know what Spirit Week is, let me try to explain.

During Spirit Week, each of the four high school classes competes against the others in several different competitions. There are relays (potato sack, 3-legged, Dizzy Izzy, etc), limbos, grape tosses, and -perhaps the biggest of all- a HUGE lip sync competition. Each class adopts a theme for the week, and their apparel, hall decorations, signs, and music choices for the lip sync hinge on this theme.

One of the areas in which the classes are judged is "Overall Spirit", which is shown through the way the classes act throughout the week. It's a pretty broad category. Very hard to judge.

This year, the Juniors' theme is Winter Wonderland. They've been littering the campus with santa hats, snowflakes, and candy canes, and, if you listen closely, you can hear spurts of Christmas songs playing in a distant hallway every now and then. It's like Santa's elves have escaped from the North Pole and gone crazy, spreading their cheer like snow all over.

So here I am, minding my own business, sitting on my couch in my comfortable apartment watching Dancing With the Stars, when there comes a knock on my door. I thought it might be Janet. I open the door without checking out the peephole.

Imagine my surprise when I find 3 adorable Juniors, decked out in their class color (orange) and Santa hats, singing Deck the Halls, then Joy to the World. In an effort to show their spirit to any teacher who might possibly be a judge, they had gathered a list of addresses and were petitioning their cause door to door. I was their first stop; the girl in charge had been in Belize with me and knew I'd get a kick out of it all.

They didn't seem too disappointed when I informed them that I'm not a judge and don't even know who the judges are; they were having too much fun. I invited them in for hot chocolate (because isn't that what you do for carolers?), but, although they came in for a few minutes to see my place, they had to hurry on their merry way to see how many other teachers they could sing to before it got too late.

How fun! And so foreign to me, this world of private schools where students know where teachers live and use that knowledge for good rather than evil. Most of the time, at least.

So... Merry Christmas, everyone!