Why? For the love of God, WHY??!!??

NOOOOOOOOOOO! With Halloween being only a couple of days away, I realized something... IT gave me a sinking feeling and filled me with much dread and makes me want to run into the closet and hole up in there for the next few months...
After Halloween, it's always the same friggin' thing... There's a short calm before the storm... I mean VERY short. And when the storm hits...
It's that time of year when I have to get through the preparation for and survive the holidays... I hate it. Before Thanksgiving, I have the ALL the Christmas shopping done and all presents wrapped, "holiday outfits for portraits" are purchased and subsequently the Santa picture taken, plans all laid out for dates and time the children or myself or the lot of us need to be where and at what time, holiday cooking/ baking is planned out, teacher gifts/ bus driver/ postman/ garbage guys, etc. gifts are made, The tree, the decorations, the food prep, the cooking, the cleaning, the baking, the house hopping...
GAAAAAAAAH! It all runs one into the other... Thanksgiving, pre-holiday shit, Christmas, New Years.... And of course, because my time with the children is shared, all of the plans have to revolve around when I have them. Thankfully, there will never be a snag as far as the "Holiday visitation" is concerned. We've never really been big into the Thanksgiving thing here and never were big on the Christmas thing either. I usually celebrate "Christmas" with the kids the weekend before the actual holiday, which is basically them opening up a few presents that Randy, our magical Christmas elf hides around the house like Easter eggs. (Santa being too busy to deliver them himself and all...) Both of those holidays they spend with their dad and his family. But it still leads to solo house hopping for me...
I think it's the chaos of the holiday season, which seems to start at 4A.M. on November 1, that makes me want to scream. People get shittier and more rude and pushier and nastier... And having to have to be out and about, I have to deal with them... I just as soon get it all done as soon as possible, before things reach critical mass (starting in December) so that I can avoid the worst of it.
Of course there is a saving grace, a silver lining, the whipped cream on the top of a honkin' pile of ice cream, the icing on the warm cookie that melts all over the place because you didn't wait for the damn thing to cool, but you couldn't wait, so you slathered the fuckin' thing with icing and shoved it into your face and ended up with icing all over yourself and... What? That last one's just me? Oh... Sorry...
It's the food. The hams, the turkeys, the side dishes, the appetizers, the desserts, the yummy smells that come from just about every kitchen all over the place... <Drool!> Bring it on... I will traverse through storms and blizzards and nuclear holocaust to house hop to get to the noms... But still... Can't I just have the noms without all of the holiday fanfare?