Tuesday, December 27, 2011

A Very Random Recap of Our Christmas

I could NOT get into the holiday spirit this year.  I don't know what it was (truly, I don't), but I was dragging my feet all the way to Christmas Day.  One evidence of this: I have a stack of Christmas cards that didn't get given out.  And that doesn't even bother me!

In my brain, I love the idea of creating some Christmas traditions for our family.  Things like have a Decorate-the-Tree evening, where we make hot chocolate or some other tasty drink and eat tasty Christmas snacks and decorate the Christmas tree together.  That didn't happen this year, since we didn't do a tree at all.  

I had really really wanted to do a tree this year.  People are surprised when I admit that we have never had a Christmas tree in our family since we've been married.  Various reasons for this include being pregnant, just moving, being out of town, not wanting to police the tree from little fingers.  But I thought that I could handle the policing this year, and that the girls would enjoy putting on some decorations.

But it just never worked out, so there you go.  The only Christmas decoration I had up was the centrepiece I made at the ladies' night out.  Which was a nice one, but looked oh so lonely.

Another Christmas flop for us was Christmas Day meals.  We had planned to make a Scrambler for breakfast, and individual pizzas for supper.  Well, guess what we found in our fridge Christmas morning?  No cheese.  Oh sorry, two teeny tiny pieces of cheese.  Not enough for anything.  So off scurries Mark to 7-11 to pay $9 for 400g of cheese.  I may or may not have peed myself hearing the price.

But it wasn't all bad.  This year for opening our presents, I borrowed an idea I read over at Living Life Intentionally.  The idea was to let the kids open and play with presents as they went, if they wanted to.  I liked that idea, since it might let the kids appreciate their toys and not get a more-more-MORE mentality as they hopped from present to present.

So we tried this and it seemed to go so well.  We stopped and put together toys (and wow, do some toys have about a million parts.  With no instructions).  And we played.  It took us much longer to get finally done, but at the end, it felt good to me.  It felt like how I have hoped Christmas Day would feel.  Relaxed and together.  


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