We had a quiet, pleasant day with the family. I’d accepted by December that I wasn’t going to be having the tons of blinking lights, yard decorations, and general overdone tackiness that I tend to go for in my holiday celebrations. We didn’t even get the tree up until last week; I dragged it down out of the attic and let the kids set it up and decorate it. Other than the tree, and the Christmas witch on the door, we were unornamented.
Meanwhile, up and down the street, my neighbors all have their lights strung along the eaves and on the trees and bushes, the luminaries lining the street, the wreaths on the door. One of them has a ten-foot snowman that lights up at night. And here I was with no yard decorations at all. I felt like the grinchiest Grinch in Whoville.
But the kids didn’t care. Yesterday they were excitedly watching Santa’s progress with me on the NORAD Santa Tracking website. They actually tried to go to bed early, although they were too excited to sleep and kept coming out to see if The Man in the Red Suit had come by yet. The older one was concerned that we were still up, because we’d informed them that there was a danger of Santa skipping our house if he found them out of bed when he came by. (We assured him that Santa would come by if the parents were up.)
This morning the younger one actually stayed in bed until he was sure everyone else was up and about, because he didn’t want to see the presents until we were all there to share it. They were delighted with everything they got, and spent the afternoon in their rooms playing with their new toys. Then we went to my in-laws’ to have Christmas dinner with both sets of parents, which was much more fun than previous years when we’d go first to one house and then the other.
Finally my parents and I went to the hospital to visit Grandma. We’ve gotten her presents, but she doesn’t want to open them until she goes home. I think she doesn’t realize just how long she’s likely to be in hospital. Seems she’s got some heart irregularity that’s really concerning her doctor; once they get her stabilized and the bedsore infection healed, he wants to put in a pacemaker. So yeah, she’ll be there a while. I bought her a Reader’s Digest so she’d have something to read during the long boring day, but then forgot to take it with me. Have to remember to take it tomorrow.
All in all a quiet holiday, which is about all I’m up for lately. Some other year maybe I’ll do the big parties and decorations and everything. This year I’m just going to marvel at how the kids’ rooms, which were reasonably tidy this morning, now look as if someone set off a bomb in a K’Nex factory. I’m still too amazed by the scale of it to try and do anything about it. I keep wondering about the square footage of their floors and wondering how many K’Nex can fit into the space. From the looks of it, all of them.
Merry Christmas, everybody!
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