Happy Holidays

Merry Christmas! (Happy Holidays for the rest of you!)

Christmas is always a big event for my family, and I am always curious as to what others traditions are for the holidays. My family follows the same general tradition every year. My immediate family, my grandmother, and usually two aunts visit my grandfather's grave on Christmas Eve, and light some luminarios before going to Christmas dinner. This has transition from going to eat a nice place to a pot luck kind of thing at one of our houses and we usually have Mexican food for dinner. Then we go to a candlelight service and go home. On Christmas day, I open presents with my immediate family and then cook something for our communal extended family gathering (more of a traditional American theme). Everyone who is in town (which is most of my mom's side) gets together and we have dinner and then basically watch my grandmother open presents.

Also, I was wondering if you received or gave anything interesting this year. I am most happy about receiving a memory foam mattress topper, as I love to sleep. The best thing I gave year was a gift card for professional massage to my sister, which is something she greatly is anticipating, and the funniest thing was a book of pick up lines to her as well as a gag gift. Hope some other people will share, and Happy Holidays!

Christmas has always been my favorite holiday of the year. I love decorating for it (even more than Halloween, though Gadreille is far more fond of that one), especially the Christmas tree. And our lights look better each year, as we get more of them.

As for gifts, we've never really been able to afford to get gifts for other people. We do what we can, like taking pictures and making cards to send out to family members. And we buy a few gifts for the younger kids. We always manage to get more than we expected though. This year... we got a new X-box to replace the broken one, with a Kinect so that my son can play and have fun (he loves to dance). We got an electric fireplace, since it was the one thing we didn't like about our new house. That was awesome to open up and put together, especially since we opened it on Christmas eve, so it was up in time for Christmas And we also got a new laptop, which I am writing this post on. It is far better than what we needed, but I'm certainly not complaining.

And, of course, my son got a whole lot of gifts! Toys galore! But, if you can believe it, he was typically more excited about most of the clothes he got

Because of the general lack of money, I was not able to buy gifts for anyone. My wife made an effort with pictures/cards, and a few small gifts.... but maybe next year.

Merry Christmas!

I was so busy yesterday I couldn't respond to this, but thank you for putting it up!

On Christmas Eve Eve, we opened up our gifts from my mother and father. Every year we split into teams to buy each other stocking stuffers, and this year, five out of the seven members received a Hobbit: The Unexpected Journey T-shirt. It was pretty hilarious. Like you read above, we also received the xbox/Kinect and electric fireplace. My parents spent way too much money on us, but as we are a poor people, my family likes to spoil us this time a year and it is admittedly nice to get a shiny new thing The fireplace makes me think of home, which is one of the few homes that still has a wood burning fireplace (quite a large one, considering some others I've seen). This electric one just brings a centerness to our living area.

On Christmas Eve we hosted dinner, and my mom and dad and sister-in-law came over to our home to cook. I am a terrible cook, so mostly I cleaned, entertained the kids, ran to the store to get things, and set up. I did make some green beans though. My whole family came over for dinner and I handed out my meager gifts. Everyone got something...but I think my favorite gift I gave was a pajama set for my brother. The shirt had a T-rex that said "If you're happy and you know it clap your....never mind" which made my brother crack up laughing because of an inside joke we have.

The next day we went to my grandparents for Christmas morning. They made pancakes and eggs and bacon and we opened our gifts. My grandparents love to spoil and that is where we received a new laptop. My uncle went in on it too so it is quite a nice laptop (in my opinion, I don't know much about these things). We also got new rugs for the kitchen and bathroom, as well as wash cloths. Ysopet got a lovely jacket and I a new purse. I helped my grandmother and grandfather with a lot of the shopping (footwork wise, not financially) and it was quite funny to learn that the day I went and bought a purse for my grandmother from my grandfather, she had purchased one for me in the very same store! She also got the whole family Big Bang Theory T-shirts, which was quite hilarious

We spent a long time there, and in the evening we went to Ysopet's aunts house to visit his family. I got to see my niece who I haven't seen since April, which was very nice

Someday I hope I get to spoil my family, and like Ysopet said, maybe next year is our year. But no matter what I'll always have something for my loved ones under the tree.

Zephyr, it sounds like you guys have some very solid traditions that make it easy to appreciate the good things in life.

Gadreille and Ysopet, I'm glad you guys had such a great holiday with some very nice gifts!


For Christmas Eve, Jonathan and I had our Christmas dinner, and we did the traditional open-one-gift-at-night-before-bed thing. It's not his family tradition because I guess his family never did it, but my family has been doing this since before I even existed, and I like it, so I'm keeping it for us. He seems happy with it, too. The gift is always pajamas, so we can have a nice, new pair of PJ's in which to sleep that night and to open presents the next morning.

On Christmas, we opened presents. His got a bread maker, a bread maker cook book, and a bread-keeper for the fresh bread. Since his father's pretty wealthy, it's actually a really high end machine, and it was nice of his father to get that for us.

His aunt and uncle got us the first season of New Girl and the last season of House. His mother gave us a large vanilla scented candle and a little, square dragonfly-decorated candle holder plate. She got me a cute bracelet made of regular amethyst, lavender amethyst, and onyx beads that's really pretty along with a Barnes and Noble gift card. She gave Jonathan the first season of Person of Interest.

My friend, Laura, gave me a cute salt-and-pepper shaker set. The salt shaker is a racoon while the pepper shaker is a fox in honor of Jonathan's anniversary present to me when we went to the wildlife preserve and I got to interact with those two animals (along with others).

My grandmother gave us a card and each of us got a check for $50 dollars. It kind of bothers me that my grandma gives us that kind of money all the time because she does not have that kind of money to just toss at us... I always worry for her, probably more than I need to, but yeah... Anyway, in the card, it said that we should use the money for something fun, but the word "fun" was underlined, and I went, "Guess she means for us to go to a sex shop." and Jonathan was like, "That's what I thought, too!" hahah My grandma laughed when I told her about it.

Anyway, I got Jonathan the four books in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series on Gadreille's recommendation, and I also got him a T-Shirt in a tin that has a print of an old X-Men comic book cover on it.

He got me this neat wrap-around ear thing that is shaped like a dragon, and it's tail is supposed to go through my ear piercing. My only worries are when am I going to wear it, and will the metal make my ear hurt because earrings that aren't a pure metal tend to cause a bad reaction on my skin. He also got me this fleece lounge shirt that is black with grey panels lining the sides and underside of the sleeves for a nicely slimming effect. Finally, I opened a medium sized box to find a tiny piece of paper with a corset printed on it. He said he would have gotten me the actual corset for Christmas, but he was worried I'd guess his intent if he asked for my measurements (which are essential for a real corset because you can't just go, "Well, my bra size is ___, so clearly this is the size for me!" You have to measure the waist and go four to five inches smaller on the corset.

As for cards, I got one from my friend Ally, and I got some with gifts from others, but my favorite - by far - was the one from Gadreille that had a beautiful letter inside it and a picture of the Grinch in a Santa suit on the front. Aside from the wonderful letter that I enjoyed reading (btw, I think the FoG Book Club is what got us talking to each other more and helped us form the first layer of foundation for our friendship), the Grinch thing was coincidentally perfect because Jonathan has been calling me a Grinch since November when the radio started playing nothing but Christmas music and all of our neighbors started decorating their houses for Christmas. I hate Christmas music (I've been hearing variations of the same three songs for twenty-three years, and I'm over it.), and I only like elegant holiday decorations. I hate the cheesy, fat, blow up Santas people stick on their lawns and stuff like that...

Anyway, after that, we had a lazy day of watching Chuck and calling our loved ones. I made gingerbread cookies, and after lunch, I had to work for five hours. I slept like the dead, though. It was nice aside from my headache I acquired halfway through the day. I think it's because I ate a candy cane on Christmas Eve forgetting that it has red dye in it, and that red dye gives me two-day-long headaches with no conceivable cure. Not worth it, so the rest of the candy canes have been regretfully handed over to Jonathan.