Christmas and stuffs

All things considered, it wasn’t a bad Christmas at all.

It took me a long time to get into the Christmas spirit this year. Even while I was out shopping or decorating, or wrapping gifts, it was more of a sense of obligation that drove me to it than actually wanting to.

Mom and I got a tree a week before Christmas. The next day, it was brought inside and set in the tree stand. It stood in the tree stand unwatered and undecorated for five days. I had been waiting for a time when we were all home to decorate it together. Because we always decorate it together. It’s tradition. On Thursday I realized that unless somebody took initiative and did it, it simply wasn’t going to get done. So all alone in my house, I decorated the tree myself. Sigh. Some things just aren’t the same.

Christmas Eve I had to work until 7:30. This, combined with the fact that my choir director decided that he wanted us to sing at the later service, meant that I couldn’t go to the 7pm candlelight service at my church (which I’ve gone to for the last 7 years).

After work, we had Christmas Eve dinner at my mom’s friend Carole’s house. There was some gift exchange after dinner, and then we left to get ready for church. Church itself was good. I was a little sad that we didn’t get to sing some of my favorite Christmas carols. And at the very end of the service, Silent Night was different. Not in a bad way, but in a I don’t really like things to change much way. Usually they have the first verse in German as a solo, and then the congregation sings the rest in English. This year, they repeated the first verse in sign language, Spanish, French, Italian, and German. And then the congregation sang the rest. My only major complaint was that it made it really long.

We got home from church around 12:30 and then I still had a CRAPLOAD of wrapping to do. I was up wrapping presents until 4am. Then I brought them downstairs and had to arrange them along with the presents that my parents got around the tree. It was somewhere around here that I got a burst of Christmas spirit. I had gift cards for each of my parents and sisters. So rather than just simply put them under the tree with everything else, I hid them and made up little riddle-rhymes for them to go find them, sorta like a treasure hunt :-). If I had begun it sooner than 5am on Christmas day, then I probably would have given several successive hints where one led to another. But it was 5am. ‘Nuff said. 😛

So I finally got to bed around 5:30. And then was awoken at 9:30 to unwrap gifts. So now a summary of gifts recieved:

Two CD’s: Gretchen Wilson and Fallout Boy
Two shirts and a sweater
a bunch of earrings and couple of bracelets
A jewlery box
$50 🙂
homemade fleece nightgown thing (from Carole)
aaannnnddd *drumroll please* my favorite thing that I got ….

an electric blanket 😀

That’s all for now… hope everybody else had a nice holiday 🙂