Happy Holidays (ho ho phew!)

Christmas is over. I think the dividing line between childhood and adulthood is one's feelings about Christmas. One year you're excited, can't wait, full on positive. The next year the dread creeps in. That's when you really know you're an adult. "What do I get for ________?" "How am I going to get to three different houses to open gifts and how am I going to haul all that crap around without giving myself a hernia?" "Why not just go away for Christmas this year?"
That last one is the one that always gets me. When I step over the line from dread into the quicksand of avoidance. Sucks me down every year around about the 15th. This is when I suddenly take an interest in spending quality and quantity time with the kids, when vegging out in front of the TV suddenly seems like a goal rather than something only other people do, when getting the gifts and doing all of my other ninety million chores becomes Mt Everest and I'm not even up for the foothills. And you know nothing good is going to come of it. And yes, folks, I did find myself in Target on Christmas Eve day, swearing that I was never going to wait until the last minute to buy these damn presents and next year I was going to shop online- and get it gift wrapped, darn it. I think next year I'm just going to bring along a mini tape recorder so I can stop wasting breath saying the same thing every year.
But I made it, and this ended up being one of the best Christmases for me, ever. Not only did my parents get me a fabulous present but no disfunctionality presented itself in a major way and my husband was there, was present, and didn't do his patented 'I hate Christmas' routine. My daughter tells everyone about the kitchen grandma & grandpa got her, my son actually plays with the toys he got, I bought the presents my husband gave me so I didn't have to pretend to like something I hated, and I managed to cram everything back in my xB and get it home in one piece and actually unpacked. So no more finding a grocery bag six months from now and discovering snack size Hershey bars from a stocking melted into little chocolate rocks at the bottom. Yeah!