What a wonderful time of year!
Confessions:
I started humming Christmas carols in Septemer. Yes, Septemeber.
When the $1 store started putting out Christmas stuff before Halloween, I thought, “Cool!” It was weird to see Christmas stockings next to creepy masks, sure, but still my thought was not, “What the?” but “Cool!”
Finding Christmas music on the radio in early November was a happy, memorably joyful discovery.
I planned on getting cards & packages out immediately after Thanksgiving.
That’s how crazy I was this year. It was new for me. Last year I caught the Spirit of the season somewhere around the 20th.
Results?
Well, I still haven’t sent 80% of the packages I meant to send.
Cards made it to (most) of their destinations just last week… except for those that are still sitting here with me in the office.
Which just shows to go ya that even 4 months of planning is not enough. Remind me to post about my new solution to that “problem.”
Another confession:
By the time we actually bumped into the week of Christmas, I was sick of it. (Shhh! Don’t tell Santa! I want my slippers&socks installment again next year!) Done with the carols. Done with the present-planning, done with goody-making, card-writing and house-cleaning and all that. John and I had a nice little chuckle about it together Christmas Eve.
You see, he forced himself into the holiday mood the day after Thanksgiving mostly to humor me. He does that a lot, you know. (humoring his wifey – not the Christmas Spirit thing.) And some of it was Bishop-guilt. He didn’t feel like he could hope the ward members would get into the holiday spirit and enjoy themselves if he wasn’t willing to. Sound logic, I think. And it got my Christmas lights hung without my even asking! Woot!
3 weeks of it did to him what it took 3+ months to do to me — We were at the “AHHH! GET IT OVER WITH ALREADY!” climax at the same time. Love it.
Yes, it’s true.
Much of my joy on Christmas Day was the fact that the was ending. A beautiful, peaceful, love-fostering, testimony-growing, relationship-strengthening time, coming to a close. And I was glad. Very glad.
Don’t mean to be a Grinch about it, of course, but it was also a house-is-a-whirlwind, never-see-John-cuz-he’s-doing-tithing-settlements season.
Or maybe it’s just that our tree died somewhere around 2 weeks ago. By now it’s…. yeah. I’m a little teeny bit excited about getting that firehazard out of our living room. Mm-hm. That might be part of it.
On a different note…
I’m *extrememely* grateful my family (parents, siblings, grandma) humored me this year and let me host the Christmas-Day gathering. Normally we go to my parents,’ which totally makes sense: their’s is the bigger, more put-together, easily entertain lots of people sort of home. It’s got all the decorations I grew up with, and in many ways has lots of my “feels like Christmas” tied up in it. And they don’t have munchkins underfoot & undermining any special holiday decorating/cleaning going on. Helps.
But I just craved our family in our house this year. Christmas Eve day all we did was play together. The kids played on jungle-gym daddy all morning long. We made gingerbread men for Santa, tidied up the playroom so he could come, and finished up our advent calendars. The kids went to bed at their normal bedtime, after acting out the nativity and having a special family-night sort of evening. It was a slow, wonderful day at home with daddy. Not often we get to do that. I loved it, even if the cookies turned out a little on the hard side. (Darn.)
And Christmas morning they came to us! (My family, anyway.) We didn’t have to rush off anywhere, we could let the Christmasing kinda linger on all morning, and just wrap my family into when they rolled in around 10. What a blast! I’ll save more details for a later post when all the pictures have been gathered. Later that day -after Eagle’s nap- we went down to John’s folkses for the bigger Smith-side gathering. Way fun.
And thus it went.
Emphasis on the past-tense.
