I started working at the preschool back on September 15th. I remember that date because for everyone working there, it was payday, and payday is on the fifteenth and last of each month, even though its actually only for two weeks at a time, which means that your pay gets backed up, so, quarterly, the director catches up by giving you an extra large paycheck. September 15th was extra-large payday.
This really isn’t terribly important except for the fact that it meant my three month probation period came up on December 15th, and so my boss came up to me with a congratulations, and an employee “self-evaluation”, otherwise known as the fourth circle of employee hell.
The trouble with self-evaluations is that you have to find the perfect balance of humility and pride in your work. You can’t give yourself a perfect score for everything, no matter how good you thought you were at it, and you can’t score yourself to low, because then you boss either sees through your ruse, or decides that if you think you’re not very good at your job than perhaps you’d be better off not working there.
That, and the phrasing on the form is very amusing in the preschool employee context.
For instance, the category of productivity: “Do you execute your responsibilities in a timely and efficient fashion?” After considering what the most timely and effective way of executing fifteen to twenty three and four year olds would be, I finally decided the question referred not to the kids in my care, but in fact to the speed with which I performed my other responsibility: cleaning bathrooms. I gave myself an 85 out of 100. I do tend to dally a bit when wiping down the toilets with bleach, as it is really the only moment at work in which I can turn my mind off and let my thoughts swim in whatever direction they wanted to.
Which is why it was difficult to make sure that my ideas for the many Christmas presents I had to buy this year did not consist solely of Chlorox and scrub brushes. But I love my family, so I didn’t actually buy them any cleaning tools.
My family has the rather amusing tradition of getting together every Christmas Eve at my father’s old family home (where my aunt currently lives) to sing Christmas carols and generally have a bit of holiday carrousing. This is amusing because the fact is that the vast majority of my father’s family actually has no training or ability when it comes to singing. A few marked exceptions include my aunt Jeannie, my aunt Eve, and my cousins Leah and Danny. Most of them have SOME knowledge about carrying a tune, but we can never seem to agree on a key in which to sing.
Last year this became a particular difficult fact for me to deal with, as I was sitting next to my older sister on the couch, and when Aunt Meg started one carol in a rather high, obnoxious key that I simply couldn’t hit with any kind of grace, my sister leaned over me and said: “Good job, Ms. Piggy”.
Its very hard to sing “Silent Night” with any passion when you’ve just had your voice compared to Frank Oz doing a falsetto.
Other little traditions that have developed in our Christmas Eve carolling event are based on the Muppets. In fact, my mother swears up and down that the only reason why any of her children know anything at all is because of Jim Henson. None of my siblings can recite Louis Carrol’s “Jabberwocky” without being tempted to add in a few giggling “galumph”s. We sing Frank Sinatra with extra lyrics and funny voices. And at the end of “Angels We Have Heard On High”, we break into Harry Belafonte. Seriously. I’m not kidding.
We even have a small hand jive worked out to it.
We do have our moments of seriousness, mostly on the more nontraditional Christmas songs that I’ve actually only ever heard within the context of my aunts Jeannie and Eve. But for the most part, the highlights of the Church family Christmas are when my older brother decides that he needs to speed up the tempo of our dirge like “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen” by ringing a bell ornament from the tree, and my cousin finds the perfect spot in the song to remark: “You’ve just proved that all it takes to amuse a member of the Church family is something shiny that makes noise.”
Maybe that’s only funny to us.
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