Man, that was a lot of Christmas! There is only so much joy and frivolity that one can take, and I am wiped out! The 26th should be a national holiday as well: a day of recovery. See, New Year’s Day is nice, because everyone does their celebrating the night before, and then you get a day to sleep it off. I need a day to sleep off Christmas, but sadly no national holiday will ever give me what I crave. I have children.
We started early on Christmas Eve with a breakfast out. It was me, my wife, my two children, my wife’s sister and her husband and their two children, my wife’s other sister, and my mother-in-law. Phew! This family keeps getting bigger! Luckily we all fit at the table and filled ourselves up in preparation for our second annual Christmas Eve Scavenger Hunt! We started this modified tradition last year, and this year it continued to be a success, culminating in this awesome video mash-up of everyone singing embarrassingly in public. So…a huge success.
From there we came back to our place where we hosted lunch and opened some little presents from the hunt. With the day flying by, and no chance to rest, it was quickly time to get ready for church. I was singing so I tried to leave early, except our car died. Luckily my mother-in-law, who was spending the night along with my wife’s older sister, gave me a ride to church and the rest of the family arrived later. After the service we came home, opened our Christmas jammies, and sent the kids to bed so we could set up the presents and stockings and watch “Love Actually.”
Now, that seems like already enough Christmas to me as I look back on it, but that was just the warm up! We put Nini in Edward’s bed, and Auntie Stephanie on an air mattress for the night, while Edward got moved to a pile of blankets on our bedroom floor that Ruby liked to call “his nest.” Then we tried to get in a few hours of sleep before the inevitable shrieking joy that awaited us as soon a creature started stirring.
Edward was the first one awake, as usual, but since he is two and did not understand Christmas (or how he ended up on our floor) we got him to cuddle for a few extra minutes before it was time for the fun to begin.
“Edward,” my wife said sleepily, “do you know who came last night and brought you a present?”
“STEPHANIE!” he shouted gleefully, and decided to run into the other room to find his aunt.
He burst into his room, ready to wake up his sister and get down to the business of opening that present he had been hearing about, but his room did not look how he expected it to look.
“WHO’S IN MAH BED?!” he shouted, running over to poor sleeping Nini like one of the three bears discovering a porridge stained Goldilocks. “WHO’S IN MAH BED?!”
Now everyone was awake, so we came downstairs for the orgy of stockings and presents and candy and merriment, pausing briefly mid-morning for french toast and a half a pound of bacon each, and then diving back into the holiday madness. The adrenaline was flowing and our tiredness melted away. Until the afternoon when everyone wanted to pass out and die. But no, we had more Christmas to do! Off to my wife’s younger sister’s house for Christmas dinner and the adult gift exchange. The kids were miserably cranky by this point, completely overstimulated, and wanted nothing more than to attack their cousins, a task which they performed admirably.
The evening finally became fully merry again when we sent all the kids upstairs to, as my wife put it, “Lord of the Flies” themselves. We adults stayed downstairs and ate cookies and played games and laughed, while our children stayed upstairs participating, for all we know, in the first annual Hunger Games. It was glorious.
But of course we stayed late, and by the time we got home everyone was ready to collapse. Which we all did. Except then the morning came. My wife is actually at work right now, passed out under her desk I am assuming, and I am here sitting in a dazed stupor, trying to write a blog post while my children play with all of their new stuff loudly in the background. I’m hoping that I can make it to lunch time, but it’s not looking good at this point. I feel that I may expire shortly, or at least fall into a deep sleep that can only be broken by true love’s kiss. But I am a parent and do not have a choice in these matters. I must stay awake and alert. It looks like another “one thing of Coke” kind of day.
And hopefully I can recover enough today and tomorrow to survive Christmas with my side of the family on Friday and Saturday.
Make that two things of Coke.