The Day After

It’s all over for another year.

Thank goodness.

Don’t get me wrong. It was fun. But enough is enough.

First there is the shopping. I believe I’ve hinted I’m not much of a shopper. I’ve gone on shopping trips where I stand in stores agonizing over gift choices and end up leaving the mall empty handed. The one good shopping trip I had this year was with Sue, Lexi, and Nicole the Sunday before Christmas. Those three don’t do much agonizing. Austin had asked Nicole to pick out a pair of sunglasses for Zach. We came home with four.

In conjunction with the shopping, there is the spending. I try to stick to a budget, but I’m not ever entirely successful. Somehow, there are always those last minute gifts I feel compelled to buy, and, if there are three of the same gift, they somehow don’t get tallied into the expenditures. And Santa feels the need to deliver his own special gifts to the girls. That completely blows the budget.

Then there is the decorating. In my mind, decorations = clutter. And you know how I feel about clutter. But those decorations do bring back memories or represent long-standing traditions.

For example,

The tinsel that is saved from year to year and the snowball light strand from the 70’s on my parents’ “tree”.

The homemade crèche at my grandparents’ house.

The Happy Birthday cupcake at my mother-in-law’s.

And our own.

Then there is the food.  The planning, the buying, the preparing, the eating, and the cleaning. The lists I come up with for food-related activities alone are daunting. I have to say, however, Christmas Eve dinner came out quite well despite being an hour late. (My mother asked me about my oven temp, and I snapped at her. I later discovered the oven temp wasn’t right, but don’t tell her.) My brother complimented me on the dinner by saying I had not added anything at the last minute to ruin any of the dishes like I usually do. Leftovers would have been kept to a reasonable amount if we hadn’t come home from my mother-in-law’s with more food than we brought. Much more. Dessert, mainly. We now have two close-to-untouched Costco-sized cheesecakes in our fridge.

Finally, there is family. I have to be honest. There were some … tensions (see above, for example). But, for the most part, we like each other. So, family is one aspect of the holiday season I don’t get tired of.