A Very Merry Little Christmas...

Happy Boxing Day! I hope your Christmas was filled with love. I had a very lovely Christmas. Quite possibly my very favorite Christmas ever. My mom was delightful, everyone was absolutely spoiled rotten, my house looked gorgeous (everyone LOVED the wall colours!), Loki had a blast playing with my parent's dog Belle and my in laws' dog Fannie and the food was delicious and our cookies were a hit! hehe

I was way too spoiled. Our parents collaborated and gave us a Remote Car Starter!! (Very useful device allowing you to start your car from the comfort of your toasty home. So you can wait inside for 5 minutes while your car nicely warms up. As opposed to going out, scraping the ice off your windows and getting in your car that's so frozen that you try to hold your breath in as to not fog up the inside. I feel the need to explain this because I wonder if Suzan, Kelsie, Melissa and anyone else living in warmer parts of the world even use remote car starters... Are there any other uses for it ?)

So that was our big gift, and then I also got a Dirt Devil Broom Vac, a light fixture for the hallway that I had seen and loved, a little victorian lamp for our bedroom (identical to the one I had and loved that fell on the floor and broke a month ago), a wheelable weekend travel bag (for my short business trips), a handblender, a whack of matching handtowels and facecloths, warm and comfy pink slippers, an electric wok, a crystal candleholder, a necklace/earring set, a warm sweater, a warm blanket.... I think that's it. Isn't that crazy ? I almost feel like giving some away to the less fortunate... but on the other hand it's nice to have all these useful things :)

I think that my favorite part of gift opening is opening the Christmas stockings! My mom fills mine, DH's, my brother, his gf, and my dad's stocking and my dad fills moms. I have a white, blue and silver teddy bear stocking, dh has a Pooh stocking, mom has a Mickey Mouse stocking, Dad has a golf themed stocking, and Brian and Tammy still have the generic ones. I guess the unspoken stocking rule is that you have a generic stocking until your loved one buys you one that suits your personality perfectly. I got great little treasures in my stocking this year like : stainless steal measuring cups and spoons, a new vegetable peeler, candles, chocolates, emergency sewing kit, toothpaste etc. (My mom REALLY stuffs them so much that stuff falls out of it, stretching the seams)

Steph also got really spoiled. He got winter carmats, winter windshield wipers, a new car snow broom, a mini-fridge to bring to work, a headset to play WoW, hilarious King Kong slippers, beef jerky, and his stocking was full of boring guy stuff. LOL (Like a mini can of WD-40, socks, car freshener hehe) Everyone loved the gifts we gave them. (At least that's what they said hehe)

It's funny because Christmas was supposed to be tight financially for all of us. Dh and I didn't even think we could buy Christmas gifts at all this year unless we shopped at the dollar store. We had all agreed that this year would be a lovely little Christmas and of course it's not about the gifts. Well turns out dh DID get a late Christmas bonus at work after all, Some other unexpected money came in, Dad got a really nice Christmas bonus at work for the first time ever in the 12 or so years he has been working for his company. Brian got a job. Now we all went super gift giving crazy and we'll all be broke for a month LOL!

This was my favorite Christmas ever. Not because of all the crazy gift-giving. I swear. Okay okay I'm really exited about my gifts, but this was my favorite Christmas ever because we had such a good time with our families. I sang on my niece's Barbie Karaoke "Me and Bobby McGee - Janis Joplin" with my very conservative father in law. Now if you know my FIL you can just picture how ridiculous but fun and unusual that was hehe. My nephew grew out of his shy phase and is now super talkative and just too cute. My brother is crazy happy in love. And his girlfriend is actually really really nice and sweet. My mother cried and cried when she opened her gift from dad. It was this huge auto-snowing, musical snowglobe with all the Disney characters. My mom is a Disney freak. Her house is like a Disney Museum. It plays this song, I think it's called "Your dreams/wish can come true". She later said that she loved that song because her dreams and wishes did come true, and can still come true, and it made her cry again.

My favorite part of Christmas was when only mom, me and dh were in the kitchen and we started talking about having children. Mom said that she never thought she would have children. She said that because she was raised spoiled rotten (She was the only girl out of 4 children, she was daddy's little girl) she thought she wouldn't have the patience to raise children, that she would be an unfit mother. She said that it was dad who wanted children most. Then she said that she never regretted for a second having children. That she would have rather have lived on welfare rather than not have us and have more luxuries. That when she looks at us, she thinks that she did a pretty darned good job.

Everyone left in a hurry last night, a day early because there was a big snowstorm coming to Bathurst and Fredericton. (50 cm in Bathurst yuck) Brian and Leon had washed and dried the dishes and I had put them away. Everyone had left and DH was playing WoW with his new headset. I was putting our gifts away and thinking about our conversation with mom and all of a sudden I felt like I was "healing". Inside. I realized that my mom had me young (19), she did like she knew then, and she does like she knows now. She tried her best. Dad was gone for a whole month at a time often, trucking and providing for our family. It must have been hard to raise 2 kids under the age of 4 all alone in a different city than her family and friends. I can't blame her for all those times I thought she was deliberately being cruel and tried to control my life. She did her best. I accept that now and have to move on.

Of course my mother will never know how this Christmas was my favorite ever and why. I have never lead her to believe that she was anything but the best mother in the world. And she is.