‘Tis The Season – Finally!

Now that my blog is all pretty it’s acting all weirded up, so I haven’t been able to tart up the sidebars yet. Bear with me.  Like me, my blog is a work in progress.

This weekend I finally caught the Holiday spirit.  The weather has been so warm up until now, and I’ve been in such a blue funk, that I’ve been bah-humbuging all over the place.  This weekend we had snow and while I’m not a big fan of snow, as anyone who knows me can attest by the amount of bitching and whining I do, but there is something about it to get you in the mood for some holiday cheer.  Plus, I make the boys do the shoveling and that works out just fine for me.

I also kicked off my holiday shopping.  We have drastically cut back on our gift list this year.  Mostly we’ve cut back because the excesses we usually experience have started to bother me.  I love to give people gifts, but usually I go way overboard.  It becomes such a stress to find the perfect gift, or get every item on someone’s list, that it takes the joy out of giving.  We are people who buy something if we need it.  If we want something we’ll buy that too if it’s in the budget.  Plus, we already have just about everything we want or need, so there really isn’t anything we need to put on a Christmas list.  Even my 17 year old son had a hard time coming up with something he’d like for Christmas this year.

So I came up with an idea for a “family” gift that we could all enjoy.  Usually I’m pretty anti-video games in the house because my son has a problem with being glued to them for hours on end and ignoring everything else, including bodily functions.  His old game cube and playstations have been boxed up ever since we started the remodel and were never brought back in the house and I liked it just fine that way.  But we have friends that have a Wii and they’ve told us how much they enjoy it because it’s something they can do together.  It’s different from other game systems because of the activity level, and I really like the idea of that.  Sure, you can get the role-playing games and the Mario (I do love me some Mario!) games for the Wii too, but you can also play tennis and bowling and then there’s the Wii Fit.  So I started the great Wii search, which turned out to be no easy task.  They were laying around like so much dirty laundry before Thanksgiving but now suddenly it’s like searching for the lost Ark.  Luckily the Divine Miss M is an ace detective and she hunted one down for me.

The other family gift this year is a trip to see the Monkey King show.  We love the kung-fu shows, even if they don’t have floating princess style in them. They’re a great event for our whole family, which is nice.  We went last night and it was awesome!  We had dinner together before the show, which was a treat itself because since my son has fallen in lust we hardly ever see him for dinner anymore.  (I can’t imagine what his girlfriend’s parents think of this constantly mooching 17 year old boy!)   He spent most of the evening texting his girlfriend, but it was still nice.  I should have just gotten an extra ticket and invited her along, but I’m new to this girlfriend thing from the Mom end and I just didn’t think about it until it was too late.

Other than that, we’ll have small gifts for everyone  but mainly the holidays are going to be about family, spending time together and having good food and getting back to the way the holidays are supposed to be.

Next up – kicking off the holiday baking!  Christmas will just not be Christmas for hubby until the baking smells fill the house.  His dad will also feel sorely cheated unless a box of bakies arrive in the mail too.   Like father like son!