Some people I know are so organized! My friends Charla and Annie, for example, would never understand the cartoon I’m about to draw.

In my mind’s eye I see a woman smiling proudly as she gazes at a little handmade Christmas ornament that dangles from a string in her hand. Her cat watches the ornament too, probably considering making a lunge for it. Woman and cat are surrounded by a bewildering conglomeration of paper and cloth scraps, beads, sequins, yarn, pots of glue, glue guns, twine, crafting books, thread, ribbon, paint, coffee cups and empty snack bags. Leaning at a precarious angle against the wall is a Christmas tree, not yet in a stand. I would start working on my cartoon right now if I could just find my pen and ink in all of this clutter.

Charla keeps holiday preparations simple. She is always finished by the end of October.

Annie tells me that she used to start weeks, even months, in advance, making baked goods and then freezing them. She made Scottish shortbread, molasses gingerbread men, bourbon balls, cheese straws, coconut macaroons, cinnamon stars, pinwheel icebox cookies, meringue kisses, sugar cookies decorated with colored icing and silver dragees, jelly tots and snickerdoodles. She also prepared and served several different kinds of hors d’oeuvres, including meatballs, clams casino, cheese puff canapes, ham biscuits and “little hot dogs,” miniature pigs in blankets made with Vienna sausages.

While we just took it for granted at the time, my mother did everything for Christmas. Way back when, moms shopped for presents, wrapped them, sent cards, supervised cookie baking and tree decoration, cleaned up afterwards, filled the stockings, cooked Christmas dinner and so on. The dads went to work and made the money to pay for all of it.

Some dads, I know, built doll houses and chopped down Christmas trees. Not my dad. He wasn’t good at that kind of thing. But he read us “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” by Dylan Thomas every year. He was good at that.

People might worry about being poisoned by dragees, because these miniscule candy balls are coated with real silver. A fatal dose of silver for an average human is said to be one ounce, which would amount to an awful lot of dragees. I’m thinking that swallowing a sterling silver earring, the way a baby might do, would be OK, since an earring is indigestible. It would just go right on through, as do coins, buttons, gravel and other foreign objects that babies consider to be interesting additions to their diets. Gold, on the other hand, is not toxic; go ahead and eat as much gold as you like.

When my daughter, Molly, was four she had a little friend named Ian. One day his mother brought him over while Molly and I were making Christmas cookies. Probably Ian’s mother didn’t know we were baking cookies or she never would have let him come, since Ian was strictly forbidden to eat sugar.

At one point I looked up from the dough I was rolling out and asked “Where’s Ian?” Molly, absorbed in cutting out angels and santas, didn’t know.

We finally found him in a bedroom, where he was furtively pouring a whole jar of silver dragees into his mouth. Let this be a lesson to parents of young children: This is how addicts are made. As for dragee toxicity, Ian was pretty shrimpy, even for a four-year-old, yet so far as I know he suffered no ill effects.

My old friend Biff, on the other hand, broke a molar on a silver dragee while eating a bag of cookies I made him for Christmas one year. You never can tell what’s going to get you.

Now, if Annie was at one end of a holiday activity graph, someone like Biff would be at the other extreme. Biff does nothing in preparation for the holiday season except turn off the car radio when the DJ starts playing Christmas music, which he hates. “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” is an exception.

Other than that, Biff does zip until Christmas Eve, when he gets together with his pals at the bar, after which they all hit the mall to buy presents. That’s Biff for you.

We all celebrate, or refrain from celebrating, in our own ways. It’s a free country. Isn’t it?

Merry Christmas!

(Martha Allen, of Keene Valley, has been writing for the News since 1996.)