Here I am in Minneapolis with nowhere to go, the impending birth of #4 preventing us from traveling. We have never spent Christmas in our own home, not in 11 years of marriage, and have always gone back to Ohio, where other people baked the cookies and trimmed the tree and cooked the Christmas dinner (and bought lots of presents for the kids).
On the one hand, it's nice to get all the way through Advent with our own wreath. On the other hand, now we have to do all the STUFF.
I am getting it done in bits and pieces. I wrapped presents last weekend. Working a couple of hours here and a couple of hours there, I made cookies all week: Grandma's Hungarian cookies (jam-filled rich sugar cookies), mini pecan tarts, chocolate-dipped coconut macaroons, and finally some chocolate caramel pecan thumbprint cookies that I thought Mark would like. We have plans to have Christmas Eve dinner with friends, although we haven't managed to schedule a Christmas dinner, so we might well be eating tuna salad at home (unless we decide to settle for "Chinese turkey" — I hear Shuang Cheng in Dinkytown is going to be open…)
We put the tree up today, an artificial tree we haven't put up in probably six or seven years. I handed Mark the string of lights and reminded him, "It's traditional to yell at the kids to stay away from you and get out of your way and stop bothering you until you get the lights on the tree." He gave me a quizzical look, went into the other room, and had the lights on the tree in about three minutes. I guess they didn't have that tradition in HIS family when he was growing up.
We were going to save the ornament-putting for tomorrow, but the kids dove into the box and started before we could stop them, so we shrugged and let 'er rip. The children exclaimed over the ornaments. It is the first time they have seen many of them, because… well, because we've never had the tree up before, except once or twice when Oscar was a baby.
I said to Mark as we were setting it all up, "It's almost like our first Christmas together, like being newlyweds." And it really did have a little bit of that feeling.
He said, "It is. It is 'our first' Christmas, our first own Christmas." A pause. "But I admit I'm still a little worried I'll be lonely, not being at home." I know what he means.
bearing blog 