Merry Christmas!!
Say what? It’s March? Geez, I musta been hibernating! With the bears. Yeah, nice and warm down there in that den. A little noisy with all the snoring and occasional grrring and some farting and stuff. Yeah. You guys know I’m not that interesting. [Er, here’s where the blahgger stops to open up a sticky and copy her text there just in case her fantabulous host server decides to crap out again right in the middle of a blahg entry. You know. So it doesn’t get saved and all of her wondrous prose is flushed down the nearest toilet on Mr. Gore’s information superhighway and she has to start all over again. Like yesterday. Just thinking about yesterday’s post is making me save to a sticky again. This is the last time I’ll share that information though. Just wanted you to know.]
We were down one for Christmas this year, with Mouse in Africa. It isn’t the first time and I’ll bore you some other day with my own little epiphany that you don’t have to be in your parents’ house for Christmas to happen. And be fun. Er, maybe it isn’t boring. It does involve a murder. Don’t worry, it didn’t happen to anyone I know. Anyway. I’m not very sentimental about holidays any more. You either get together with every last 4th cousin seven times removed or you don’t. Holidays can be fun but they last one day. Everyone cannot always be there. I try to make whoever is in my house have a good time and great food and call everyone else or trade dog and ugly pictures with them on email or whatever. And then life goes on. It just does. I’m sorry.
Somehow this year, I got this totally sappy idea that I would make up a Christmas stocking for Mouse to open up on the drive home from O’Hare on March 10th when we picked her up there on her flight home from six months in Senegal. Of course, that didn’t happen. I went back to work and still haven’t figgered out how to fit shopping into my schedule. Mouse didn’t end up coming into O’Hare. That whole thing got screwed up and it’s a long story but we bought her a flight from her *new* point of entry (Miami, Fla) to good old Daytwa Metro. Heck, it was cheaper than driving to Chicago and buying a hotel for the night, etc., etc., ad nauseam.
So, Mouse didn’t get much in the way of Christmas presents. Unless you count the $400 phone call. But I don’t. I call that a disaster. Don’t worry about this Mouse, I’m just being dramatic. Her host family was Catholic so they did celebrate Christmas and she was there for that, although I think she had to turn in a paper that day. I didn’t put a Christmas stocking together for her. And then, today, we were in Tarjay, *after* driving to kzoo to take stuff to her new apartment. We were buying stuff for her apartment and I realized that we were *doing* Christmas! In March. It was fun. We didn’t buy a whole ton of stuff today but we’ll be back. I needed this. I love buying my kids things! They don’t ask for much, except for an expensive college education. The one that I think I actually shoved down their throats. And they constantly complain that I spend too much money on them. It’s okay. You guys are the best kids ever and I love you. I love Christmas whenever it happens and I don’t need to shop for anything for myself. Grok gork gork.