happy holidays

I hope that everyone is having a good holiday season. Our family is having a nice, low key holiday. We had my mother in law and father in law over for lunch today. Not a huge meal but nice.

Leo has been great today. Quite calm for an 8 year old with ADHD on Christmas day. He liked the gifts that he received and thanked us several times throughout the day. He seems to enjoy his new, warmer hoodie, his nerf disc-shooting gun, and his solar powered robot the most. I said before he was born that I would not buy him a gun, but he was using a stick and pretending it was a gun, plus the two brothers down the street that he plays the most with had guns and were shooting him, so we got him a gun to keep up.

Christopher saved the day with the nerf gun. We didn't realize that it required batteries when we bought it, only to realize today that it required six large batteries. He looked around and found two in the cabinet. Later he came downstairs with four more and put all six in the nerf gun. He remembered that we have a ... I'll call it an adult sex toy that uses four batteries. As he said to me "We just won't tell him where we got them." So the sex toy rescued Christmas.

You might wonder why I celebrate Christmas, not being Christian (and not having much good to say about the church that I was raised in.) But to me Christmas was always about getting together with the family (OK, and the presents when I was younger.) My grandmother routinely fed 20+ people at the holidays. Our family gatherings are much smaller now but still special to me.

Leo has been especially affectionate lately. He spontaneously hugs me and Christopher, and he joins us when I hug Christopher in the mornings as I leave for work and turns it into a family hug. He has also been telling us that we're good parents and that he is glad that we are his parents. I wonder if part of that is that he realizes that since he is adopted that he might not have ended up with us as parents. He gave us interesting gifts - a homemade coupon book with things that he will do for us. Mine includes "dish cleaning", a cup of homemade tea, and a car wash. He's a sweet kid that I love very much.

solstice

So last night at about 9:30 PM Pacific time was the winter solstice. Although that is the official start of winter, to me winter started in early December and ends about February 1st when I see the first blooms on fruit trees around here. But we are supposed to have a hard freeze tonight, which may damage my orange trees. That was one thing that I insisted on when we put in our backyard, that we have some orange trees. I had never lived anywhere that citrus would grow until I moved to California.

Leo decided that he wanted to change his hairstyle with his last haircut, and he got it "buzzed" or cut very short as one of his friends has. It took a day or two to get used to. He liked to run his fingers through it and wants me to do the same. I'm glad to see him expressing his own opinions about his hair. Before he was born I told myself that hair isn't important and I would always let a child choose his or her own hairstyle. I guess my years of Catholic schools with mandatory short hair helped me realize that hair doesn't really matter.

We're having a low key Christmas. Just the three of us and Christopher's parents over for dinner. The "extended" family, which just adds Christopher's aunt and stepgrandmother got together last weekend. I miss my grandmother's large family get togethers when I was a kid - easily 20 people or more. Five just isn't the same.

My 92 year old great aunt died last weekend. No one was surprised. But of course, family drama had to occur. My great aunt left everything to Heather, a great niece who had lived with her and helped care for her the last several years. One of Heather's aunts accused Heather of "brainwashing" my great aunt to get her house and estate. No, she was there providing help, where were you? There is only one surviving sibling of any of my grandparents, and she is 90.

my husband is (sort of) famous

Gawker.com had a contest for worst Christmas give giving or receiving stories, and my husband submitted a story. It made the top 10 worst stories, but wasn't nearly as bad as the "winner." Oprah's best friend Gayle read on Oprah's radio show (who knew that Oprah had a radio show?) the top stories, so my husband's story was read on national radio. He used a pseudonym, and he didn't know anything about it until later, but it's kinda fame. So here's my version of the story.

His great grandmother was well known for being cheap. Each year she ordered an Old Spice gift box, with a jar of Old Spice, which she would remove and give to her husband to use, and an Old Spice soap-on-a-rope. (For those too young to know about soap-on-a-rope, it was a bar of soap with a thick string attached for holding onto, I guess, although it always seemed strange to me.) She would wrap up the gift box, with half of the gift missing, and give it to some unlucky male relative. The running joke among other family members was "Who's going to get the soap-on-a-rope this year?" His great grandmother had died by the time that I entered the family, but my first Christmas in which we all exchanged gifts, I had the pleasure of being regifted one of the last soap-on-a-ropes. Everyone was quietly watching me open it, and when I did I was shocked but tried to be polite, while thinking "Who in the f**k gives soap-on-a-rope as a Christmas gift?" David told me the story and everyone, myself included, laughed. I put the soap away to give to the next male to enter the family, but after two cross country moves the soap was lost.

it's the holidays, so my mother-in-law is going insane, as usual

My mother-in-law is doing her usual holiday freak out. I love her but she makes the holidays way more stressful than they ever should be, usually by waiting until the last minute to do anything. She has known for over a month what she wants to make our son Leo, but as of yesterday she hadn't started yet. The adults had talked about not giving each other gifts this year, and everyone was fine with that, until yesterday. Then she realized that she can't not give her only child, David, my husband, a Christmas gift. So she called, tearful, and asked me what David wants. He gave us a gift list earlier, but my mother bought most of it and I bought what was left. So I thought for a while and mentioned a tablecloth for the kitchen table would be a nice gift that we could use. So she'll make a tablecloth but worried that she couldn't get it ready for Christmas. I gently told her that David is 39, that he won't be upset if his present isn't ready on time. I don't know why people get so stressed about gifts and wanting the holidays to be perfect. I just enjoy getting together with the family, since I don't really celebrate the religious holidays.

The solstice was two days ago. It will be good to see the rays of the sun moving back toward the Northern Hemisphere, where they belong. Sorry Poppy and John, but I'm ready for more light and heat around here.