Some Christmas polls, for those of us who (1) celebrate Christmas (2) and yet are not doing anything right now. [These don’t seem to come through the RSS feed—must be something to do with the nature of poll-voting.]
[yop_poll id=”7″]
[yop_poll id=”9″]
[yop_poll id=”10″]
[yop_poll id=”11″]
[yop_poll id=”12″]
[yop_poll id=”13″]
We are in the lull between the gift-opening (nuclear family) and the eating and gift-opening (extended family). I have quite a list of thing to accomplish: clean the kitchen and the bathroom, food prep, set the table, put all the extraneous stuff (wrapping paper, mess) into my office until the guests are gone. Right before 2:00 I will light the candles, start a new fire, and wait for the onslaught.
It’s a merry little Christmas because our 22-year-old daughter came over on Christmas Eve and is spending the day with us. I will be happy when the day is over and, with it, the stress that began before Thanksgiving.
On the down side, my mom (who lives downstairs) is having a rough day with her chronic pain and still wants to do all the food prep she has planned for the day. So I’m up and down stairs today, trying to manage expectations.
TL;DR: Daughter home, family coming over, and soon it will be finished.
I should have put explain in the comments about when we opened Christmas presents. We normally open them Christmas Day, but we had our entire Christmas yesterday. Our eldest had to leave this morning so we just moved everything back. It feels a bit funny and a lot right. Merry Christmas!
Re: Christmas pj’s – I have red penguin pj’s that are Christmas themed, but they are not long enough ( I’m 6′). Thankfully I just untapped new red penguin pj’s that aren’t technically Christmas themed, but visually fit the part, and ARE long enough!!
Re: snow – I live in San Diego.
Re: mood of the day – it’s been a great morning so far, but boyfriend is leaving for work in a few hours and then I’ll be home alone for the rest of the day, and I have to go to work tomorrow.
Need to know where you got long enough pajamas plz.
Santa left some gas station candy on the hotel counter with a note saying he would leave the rest of the gifts at our house in Ohio. Spontaneous Christmas road trip to my folks in California: we didn’t pack any gifts. The kids (7.5, 6, 3.5, 1) are really cool with all if it.
So nothing is opened nor will be for a week or 2.
Feeling really pregnant and moody. Husband brought toddler down to Christmas with crusted snot on her face for Christmas morning photos. I told him I wanted to clean her up a bit. Once I cutified her in her Cristina’s outfit, and dressed my large hurty body in the only maternity thing I haven’t outgrown, she refused to take a photo with me in front of the tree. Off to the inlaws, we are their problem now. Think christmas would be soooo much better if I didn’t have EXPECTATIONS! :/
Her Christmas outfit.
No Christmas music on now as I just put the baby in his bed for nap & haven’t left his room yet.
We are having a good Christmas except that my mom, the matriarch of the family, is away tending to her seriously ill father and we all miss her & have to work twice as hard to pull it all off!
We opened some presents last night with the inlaws, presents from Santa this morning, and then more presents at the other set of inlaws after a Christmas brunch.
It’s a merry Christmas. The only thing I’m lacking is a festive Christmas dinner. I’m whining about that because I’m pregnant and was looking forward to stuffing myself, but apparently there is some sort of family conflict and now we’re not going. BOO.
My grandma died a couple days ago so I’m all “screw Christmas” this year. We opened gifts with the kids this morning and I sent the rest of the family on their merry way to do Christmas with our extended family so I could stay home and sulk!
It snowed like crazy last night but was gone by the time we awoke. I was super bummed.
Bah humbug?
I live in FL, so we don’t do the white Christmas thing.
I do have a pair of oh-so-soft-and-comfy pj’s on. They’re not really Christmas pj’s but they are what my DH refers to as my Christmas Doily pj’s because of the red & white pattern.
I’ve had to listen to Christmas music at work since the beginning of November, so no music on here today.
It’s just my DH and I, all of our family live elsewhere. We don’t exchange gifts and I don’t cook a special meal, we just enjoy the extra day off together.
The weather is beautiful and it’s been a quite, relaxed day . So yes, we’re having a merry little Christmas.
It has been a wonderful Christmas. We got about 5-6 inches of heavy wet snow last night and we had to go out and shovel the road before we opened presents this morning. (We live on a private road and each resident has to shovel their part so we can all get out to the main road.) Lovely gifts, fun family get-together over pancake breakfast, and now our prime rib dinner is in the oven!
This Christmas has been completely awful. My husband I travelled 6 hours (with our 4 kids ages 3,5,7,9) to spend the holidays with my parents and extended fam. To kick things off, my 3 year old came down with the flu and shared it with my mom. Then we opted out of spending Christmas Eve with my mom’s side since her sisters are still not speaking to her. And yesterday my Dad’s sister completely ruined Christmas Eve by screaming at my cousin causing her to leave in tears and by snapping and snarking at my husband and I, and acting like a martyr because she “had” to do all the work. next year we’re staying home.
I mean, it’s fun because they kids (9,6,5,3) are having fun and loving their gifts and visitors. But it’s not fun because my son hates long days with nothing going on and then I hate them too. Also my littlest is sick and my older brother didn’t come because of it. He has a compromised immune system so I don’t blame him but idk why my SIL or niece and nephew didn’t come. Plus it made my little brother roll his eyes and say “he’d be lucky if he got away without getting sick” when one of my kids sneezed. I mean, come on! It’s not like they have the flu or something, they just are a little sick with some bs that everyone I know has. Fa la la la fricken LA, I keep thinking.
I have nothing to explain. Just want to say I love the snow on your blog.
I live in New Zealand so no snow here and it’s now Boxing Day so no Christmas music. We had a lovely quiet day yesterday with a delicious Christmas breakfast of pastries, custard and fresh berries and didn’t need to eat much else for the rest of the day. We are staying a my MIL’s brother’s beach house so had a lovely Christmas swim. This year was even more low key than usual because my FIL died right after Christmas last year and the memories are still a bit raw. Overall it was a very merry little Kiwi Christmas.
Pretty shitty Christmas round here. No snow (but that’s not unusual, I’m in the south of France and in the 15 years I’ve lived here, I’ve only ever seen “proper” snow maybe twice, neither of which times was at Christmas), but sunny. My two daughters are in Paris staying with my ex’s mother (though he, bizarrely, is still here), and my boyfriend left to visit his family (he’s Algerian and his family are too traditional to accept him having a much older, already divorced girlfriend so I couldn’t go with him), so I’m on my own for the first time ever at Christmas (and the same for NYE for that matter). As a result, I opened the present my boyfriend left me and have spent the rest of the day watching TV, feeling sorry for myself and wishing I had some food in the house… Bah, humbug indeed
Swistle,
You are the best. Literal lol’s from me on the tum question. Many thanks for cultivating this community here and your musings throughout the year. Merry Christmas!
I do have some sort-of Christmasy flannel pajama pants with snowflakes on them but I bought them probably three years ago and wear them all winter so they’re not exactly Christmas pajamas.
My husband has been complaining all day about the wildly inaccurate weather forecasts. Not only is there no snow, but it got almost to 50 degrees. He didn’t even wear a coat to his grandma’s house, where everyone mostly got along. However I have a plan to sit my 6yo daughter down for a serious discussion about being grateful and gracious while receiving gifts.
We celebrated Christmas on the solstice thinking (hoping) I might be in the hospital or home with a new baby by now. So with Christmas long over and no baby it’s just a day that everything is closed so I can’t get any more tasty food. I’ll be happier tomorrow because everything will be back to normal or maybe I’ll be eating delicious hospital food.
No snow :(
I came downstairs to a video camera pointed at me while wearing what I fell asleep in on my three year old’s bed.To be fair, my husband was trying to get her reaction to the presents under the tree, so I was like, “Please edit this later”.
I’m sick of all of the Christmas music on our ipod (1st generation!) and I haven’t had time to sit down with itunes to add more. Pandora is completely random and I can’t find a “station” that I don’t want to thumbs down more often than not.
My kids still haven’t opened the gifts that my mom, dad and aunt sent.
Everything has taken longer to do than I anticipated: wrapping gifts, cooking meals, attempts at clean up. Everything.
Remember the pictures on the clutter post here a few years ago with Sociology text book photos? My house is about stage 3-4 right now. There was a clean bathroom, towels and linens for the In-laws, but the kitchen has been a disaster for the last two days. But it has been in heavy use mode. My husband is also redoing the kids’ bathroom right now. So all of the Christmas mess plus tools!
I just wish I had more time to sit and stare at the Christmas tree at night with a good book and a hot cup of tea!
Can you link to that post on clutter with photos? I missed it.
Christmas and other holidays have been a bit of a bummer since I ‘broke up’ with my relatives, but I got invited by a friends family, which was nice. No presents of course, but I’m old enough that I don’t think that’s really important. The best part of Christmas for me the past few years has been volunteering to sing in the hospital on Christmas Eve. Nothing makes it feel like Christmas like getting to cheer up those people!
I generally buy myself new Jammies for Christmas, but I didn’t this year. I usually buy jammies for my husband and son, too, and I didn’t do that either. Because we are swimming in jammies. But I missed it, my friends, I truly did. So next year, I’m buying the jammies, WHETHER WE NEED ‘EM OR NOT.
Presents: on account of my due date being the day after Christmas, my husband and I made the decision not to exchange gifts with anyone — even each other. I was too pregnant to enjoy shopping, we were saving our extra money for the hospital bill, and besides all that we didn’t know whether baby would be here before Christmas or if I would be too pregnant to want to see anyone anyway. So, no presents this year for the first time in my life.
Merry little Christmas: I ended up having the baby on Dec 22, and because it was an emergency c-section I had to stay an extra day — we were allowed to go home on Christmas Day. On the one hand, I finally had my baby — a girl!!!! — and was loving reveling in her newness and foreignness, but it also didn’t feel like Christmas. At all. The nice nurses left to go be with their families and the ones who were working didn’t seem to have any holiday spirit. There were no decorations, no nice Christmas dinner, just visits from the pediatrician and lactation consultant. She had lost too much weight so we were worried, and I was recovering from a surgery I didn’t expect. It was hard to feel joyful about Christmas of all things, especially when it didn’t even feel like a holiday at all. But I was joyful about my first week of being a mom, so maybe it was a merry little DAY.
We named her Ruby, by the way.