Holiday Musings

Christmas is my favorite holiday and as soon as November rolls around I'm thinking about all the good times to be had. Trouble is, Christmas in coupledom is wa-ay more hectic than those of my childhood.

In the old version, we'd go to my grandparents house a few miles away for Christmas Eve and have a holiday buffet and egg nog - I'd bring a dish or two. On Christmas morning we'd all go to my parents house for brunch and present opening and then I'd work on the Christmas puzzle in front of an endless loop of "The Christmas Story" on TBS until it was time to start the next round of dishes for Christmas dinner, again at my parents house. It took place over the span of 24 hours.

In the coupledom Christmas, we have three families to celebrate with, half of whom live on the Peninsula, which involves several hours of traveling back and forth, including a ferry ride. (Note: I'm told that by those who reside West of Puget Sound that "the Peninsula" to them means the Kitsap Peninsula, a small growth on the thumb of Washington's mitten. In my East-sider vernacular, the Peninsula refers to EVERYTHING West of the Sound.) Luckily, Sean's side of the family is notoriously gracious when it comes to celebrating on alternative days and leaving the actual day of Christmas to others. But, the drawback of this is that means two additional weekends are thus taken up traveling to Seabeck (his mom's side) or Sequim (his dad's side), which leaves oh-so-little time to shop, go to parties, and all the other holiday moments. So if we don't have all of our Christmas shopping done before the first trip of the season, we don't really get any more chances.

It's even more stressful for me because I didn't grow up sharing holidays and Sean and his family are old pros at it. Although, Sean's old version of events was doing all of his shopping in the two hours before he had to catch a ferry and then wrapping them on arrival using whatever gift bags his mom had set aside in her sewing room. I'd say we've progressed significantly since then, but maybe that's bragging? Of course, my version of progress involves lists. Shocking, I know.

Holiday Musings

Our tree is up! Well, it was up two weekends ago, but I haven't been very blog-ivated. (Aside: My new G1 phone takes lousy pictures, too. The light quality has to be super high and then dark colors aren't very clear.)

Sean is a fan of getting trees early and I'm a fan of putting out the decorations early, so we make a good team. After all, why go to the effort only to use them for 2 weeks, right? The lights on the house were super easy because we didn't take them down last year. Yeah, we're kind of "one of those" except that the way I mounted them under the eaves means that no one can even tell the lights are there unless they're turned on. So that's my reasoning.

Cooter and Roscoe have pretty much left the tree alone, and I learned last year to put decorations at least 2 feet off the ground to avoid temptations and tails. Hey - that's a good name for an ornament shop. Or a burlesque show. "Temptations and tails". Thus far there have been no casualties. *knock on wood*