Christmas report

Christmas yesterday wasn't all that exciting.  As many of you know, I'm a complete scrooge and I kind of don't see the point of the holiday when there are no kids around.  I tend to be reminded of what I've lost over the year, and now that I have a genuine anniversary to remember just days before Christmas, I just don't enjoy the style of the festivities.  Parties yes, but red and green decorations with lights and Santa, no.

I don't understand having to buy presents for the other adults in your life.  If someone wants something, don't they generally just buy it for themselves?  And if you see something you think someone else should have, don't you normally just buy one for them and give it to them for the genuine joy of giving, no matter what time of year it is?  K works in retail (though not a store that has anything good for gifts) so he basically gets to watch society get more and more frazzled and stressed out as the month goes on.  It just seems that the stress far outweighs the joy.

My brothers family does big Christmas celebrations.  He's always been more excited about Christmas than I was, I started seeing decorating the tree as a chore pretty early in life whereas he was always excited about it.  My SIL's family goes all out, wrapping every little thing they can get their hands on.  That's kinda cool.  The fun is the unwrapping really so it's likely that we'll do mostly small gifts for our kids, but lots of them so there's lots of unwrapping, and then one or two big gifts.  They are also a Christian household so perhaps that has something to do with the enthusiasm.  But the difference isn't that they have kids and we don't.  They had the enthusiasm well before they had the kids.  Now they just have more family members who get excited.

So for those of us in my original family that don't have kids, Christmas kind of just becomes a second Thanksgiving.  This year, K and I went over to my parents on Christmas Eve with some of their closest friends and we did a potluck Thanksgiving style dinner.  The only difference in the meal between this and Thanksgiving was that someone brought a ham to go with the turkey.  And my parents are pretty much of the gift giving mindset that I am.  They seriously do not want more stuff in their house.  So I make sure that they get my undivided attention for a meal and some games since that seems to be the only thing I have to give to them.  They give their kids pretty much what everyone wants - checks.  We tend to take about 10% and buy something fun (I'll probably upgrade my phone) and then use the other 90% to do responsible things like pay down some credit card debt and make sure I get a full month of bills paid in advance so I can kind of have a month off.

Christmas morning, we went over to my brother's to give gifts and my parents stopped by for an hour or so as well. I'm glad I was able to find gifts that people liked, I think 3 out of 4 of the recipients liked them (nephew seemed to move on from his gift to the next one pretty quickly), but I do always feel a little guilty that I'm not in a financial position to give more than token gifts.  I did try to make sure the gifts were specific to the person, and something they might actually like, but I can't afford to give anything that someone might not just grab for themselves on a whim when out shopping.  They were very generous and got our household a Kindle Fire.  Totally awesome!  And I wish I were in a position to return that kind of generosity.

For having 2 kids, things were actually less chaotic than you might expect.  Whenever the floor became unfindable, they'd take a break from unwrapping gifts and do a clean up.  I'm very impressed that they somehow got the kids to go along with that.  Yes, both kids, ages 6 and 2, would stop with the presents to clean up for a few minutes!

We only stayed for about an hour because Frick and Frack decided that I needed to eat, and I needed to eat a lot immediately.  So we went out to Shari's to get some breakfast.  I had eggs benedict.  Yeah yeah, undercooked eggs - bite me.  I checked that the sauce was a mix and not raw eggs and they cooked the poached eggs a touch over done so they weren't as runny as they normally would be.

K and I got home around 1pm, all of our holiday obligations over, and we decided to put the Doctor Who marathon on TV in the bedroom and just chill out and snuggle until we got bored with doing so.  We woke up about 5 hours later.

Yes, when given a day to spend together and do whatever we want, we sleep.  All hail the most boring couple in the world!

While I enjoyed this holiday immensely, because yes, I really am that boring, I'm hoping our next Christmas will be vastly different with a million and one Kodak moments to try and capture.  I'm still not ready to start saying things like "this is the last Christmas of just the two of us".  Every time my brain goes there, I'm reminded of how I said those things a year ago and how they didn't turn out to be true.  But I got through this holiday season relatively tear free, and I consider that a win.