I can’t find it now but I have a memory that in December 2011, I posted a screen grab of a weather forecast showing +4 for Dec 24, Dec 25 & Dec. 26. (Here’s one from around the same time on the same subject.) At any rate, it’s been brutally cold this week and I’m just glad I had an excuse to stay home for a few days!
Christmas mornings these days are basically 90% kids, 5% Shea & I and 5% whatever other relatives are around. (I’m okay with this.)
Shea apparently didn’t realise that starting in October or so, I save the box(es) of anything that I’ve bought myself that is “gift-like” (new gloves, new boots, new belt, etc.), wrap the empty box(es) and label it as gift to myself. She didn’t realise this because nobody ever notices an adult opening an empty box on Christmas (again, 90-5-5!) 😉
We’re not religious but Sasha’s picked up a bit from her daycare which is also non-religious but located in a Catholic school so some osmosis is pretty much unavoidable. So anyhow, somehow during Christmas, I was asking Sasha exactly what she knew about Jesus and the Nativity Scene. I said “Did you know that a magic star appeared when Jesus was born?” and she said “No, it didn’t! Only Santa is magic!” which I thought was pretty funny.
Most original gift this year? My in-laws made me a homemade giant Jenga set for us to use at our campsite next summer. Pretty amazing! (It was in a giant bag and really heavy so, since they usually buy me a bottle of booze, I thought they’d gotten me a Texas Mickey for the campsite instead!) 🙂
Like everyone, we have some traditions we always do (I get one of the kids to read “Night Before Christmas” with me on Christmas Eve) and some that we’re not as diligent about (realised after Christmas, that we didn’t manage to get any pictures of Shea and I or the whole family like we have other years!) 🙁
Some parents do a “four gift” rule buying their kids “one thing they want, one thing they need, one thing to wear, one thing to read” but Shea and I mis-heard that and did the “40 gift rule” which is something entirely different! 😉
Christmas Day is simultaneously one of the happiest and one of the saddest days of the year for me – I love everything about Christmas – the music, the food, the presents, etc. but it’s always sad when it comes to an end for another year after weeks of build-up. I think I was also hit harder by news of some deaths and injuries than I expected to be – a coworker lost her dad unexpectedly around the start of the month, a friend who lost her dad a couple days before Christmas, even a friend who’s around our age whose husband unexpectedly broke his leg in a skating accident on Christmas Eve or another friend who’s expecting the results of a bone scan to track the progression of her cancer in the new year – all made me think about how tenuous the joy of Christmas is and can be and how we have to appreciate it because we never know what the next 12 months will bring.
Pace was up wanting to open presents at 4am but I think Shea managed to get him to hold off until 6am or so. (Cue another annual tradition – the midday nap!)
Another funny Sasha moment. I had her “help” me wrap a gift for her mom. I wrote “To Shea” without thinking it made more sense to address it to “Mom”. But Sasha had me covered – when I asked her to “write her name” beside the word “From:”, she surprised me by writing “Mom”!
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