I finished my Christmas shopping surprisingly early this year, almost two full weeks before the arrival of the holiday. I shop for Susan, and Susan shops for everybody else. Over the past couple of months Sue gave me a list of five gift ideas. I got four of them. (The antique radio she mentioned at The Rink was long gone by the time I made my way back there.)
With the fiscal cliff looming Susan and I honestly didn’t know if we were going to get Christmas Eve off from work. In the end we did, which turned the Christmas holiday into a four-day weekend. Around here you need a four-day weekend to celebrate Christmas the way we do. We have Christmas Eve Dinner at our house. We eat lunch on Christmas Day at my mom’s house, and dinner that night at Susan’s sister’s house. The kids went over to Susan’s sister’s house one night to make Christmas cookies. We went and looked at Christmas lights at least three times. Even with four days to celebrate, there’s not a lot of holiday down time.
The last two years have not been White Christmases in Oklahoma, but the local weathermen predicted a veritable blizzard for 2012. They were wrong, and somehow the snow missed us even though the ice didn’t. Technically you could call it a White Christmas by the dusting of ice pellets, but it was worthless for making snowballs. Just ask Mason; he tried more a dozen times, with each fist full of hurled white dust disintegrating in the wind just as fast as he could throw them.
Christmas sort of came and went as a blur this year. Tonight, Mason’s upstairs playing his new video games while Morgan is downstairs with her nose in her nose in her new iPod, waiting for the weather to change so she can try out her new bicycle. After a day of teleworking from the house today, tomorrow it’ll be time to dig out a clean pair of pants and head back to work.
With all the horrible news over the past month of shootings and murders and people dying in house fires on Christmas, all the gifts we gave and received this year seem secondary to just being able to see everything this year and knowing that my friends and family are safe.
Merry Christmas, 2012. Now it’s time to get back to the grind.
I saw the camera out but I didn’t see much picture-taking going on. I had mine on the counter yesterday but never took even one picture. Thought of it when everyone was gone. Glad you took these at least!