My best gift

And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled 'till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.

~Dr. Seuss

We always open our gifts, just the four of us, a couple of days before Christmas. This started a few years ago - mainly because the big "family" Christmas has gotten so HUGE that we want to save a little time. One year, for example, we got so exhausted after opening gifts on Christmas Eve for 3 hours that we took a meal break before we finished the other half..... and the family has GROWN since then!

So, we opened our gifts last night, on the Winter Solstice. My sons helped me light every candle in the house (part of the Solstice tradition -- a way of encouraging the light to return and summer to come once again). To the gentle strains of "Jingle Bells" and "O, Holy Night", basking in the glow of the tree and the Vikings/Packers game, we sat in our living room and opened gifts.

When we were all done and the boys had disappeared upstairs to play their new video games and call their friends I finally had time take it all in. I snuggled up to my husband, gave him a big hug, and looked into his eyes. In all honesty I said, "Do you know what my BEST gift this year was? It was getting to stay home and take care of you guys."

With tears in his eyes, my darling husband said, "I was going to say that was MY best gift!"

You can't do better than that!

Merry Christmas

Christmas Traditions #2

One of my most treasured Christmas traditions is one my husband and I started on the first Christmas after we were married. That year we went out and bought the prettiest angel we could find for the top of our tree. We also bought a pale pink glass heart -- appropriate for a young couple in their first year of marriage. At that time we decided that we would buy one special ornament each year (the next year we added "regardless of the cost" because the ornament we fell in love with was a lot more than it should have been).

Every year we pick one day and go ornament shopping. We always go alone together. We used to do it while the boys were in daycare, but now we just tell them where we're headed and off we go. We hold hands and wander the mall and look over several (hundred) ornaments until we find just the right one. There hasn't been a year yet when we haven't agreed on our purchase. Sometimes it only takes one stop. Some years it takes more than one shopping trip. There's no way to know how long it will take or where we will find it, but we always know it's out there -- we just have to keep looking.

This year by the time we got all 19 previous ornaments on the tree it was nearly full. Of course we found a place for the ornaments that were important to us (photos, an engraved heart, the pipe-cleaner snowman), but it made me think: some day our boys will have all of these... some day they'll be setting up the tree for the "family Christmas" and we'll be long gone, but they will pull out each ornament and line them up to put them on in order just like always... they'll argue over who gets to put on the seahorses and they'll reminisce about the year the younger one climbed the lilacs to retrieve the cardinals' nest after the babies had flown... they'll look at the ones that contain photos and remark, as we always do, that we sure have changed... and they'll remember all those Christmases together in our house full of love, and they will (I hope) continue those traditions with their families.

Christmas Traditions - #1

We got our Christmas tree on Saturday. Since we live in the heart of the big city, there was no tramping through Santa's forest to cut down a tree for us. It's always more like driving through Satan's traffic jam!

I have this "gift" for always finding the perfect tree. An example: one year I actually bypassed all the trees they already had unwrapped and standing for inspection and walked to the back of the lot where the trees-in-waiting are all bundled and piled up. I picked one off the pile and made the tree-lot-guy unwrap it so I could see it. He opened it up and - it didn't even move. It was so cold that the tree was actually frozen into shape. It didn't matter, though, because I KNEW this was the one. We brought it home and set it up to warm and "fluff" up. Not only was it the perfect shape (not even one bare spot), but there was a bird's nest in it! Of course, we left the nest as an ornament.

The perfect tree this year was probably only perfect to me. It looked like it had been forgotten in the back corner of the tree lot and cut as an accident. It was about 14' tall (we have 9' ceilings), spindly, and was obviously never shaved into the commercially-perfect triangle shape. It was, as the tree-lot-guy described it, a "Charlie Brown" tree. Of course we bought it. My husband has learned never to question my decision when I pick a tree; it wouldn't do any good. Once I get my heart set on a tree we could spend another hour and we'd still go home with that same one.

We had to take about a foot off the bottom and another 4 feet off the top just to get it into the living room. The angel will stand nestled in the upper branches instead of perched on the top. Still, it doesn't matter. For this year, at this time, this is the perfect tree. They always are.