and that may be the best Christmas gift ever!

Yesterday….was the best family Christmas party ever and I am not being just nice!...

and I have thought a bit about why that is.  

Many things were just the same (same place, same people, eating, you know typical family Christmas stuff) and to be quite frank….I always went and always enjoyed but dear God how I worried and stressed beforehand. Were the gifts appropriate, would my kids stop and say thank you to the right person through the unwrapping frenzy, and please-please would they remember just 50% of the other manners I tried so desperately to instill?  Did I mention they were both boys and would celebrate and high five farts and burps?  Now if this was not neurotic enough throw in, have we dressed appropriately? (in this group that means no permanent stains), is my potluck dish good and/or big enough?, and then there were a lot of years that I just prayed our vehicle would get us there and back!  In other words, my Christmas mission was to show up, be the perfect family and leave without breaking anything or starting a family incident.  Enjoying myself or my family was nowhere on this list!  How does this happen?

This year was so different.  Of course, it has been a few years and there is some wonderful “payback

”!  Now, I get to watch my boys outside chasing their own kids and repeating chronic instructions to say thank you and excuse me. It is some validation that some (not all) of the manners we preached to our boys “took”.

We deviated from one of the “main event” plans!  Instead of individual gifts for each of the kids, I mean the years ago, 5 dollar limit had long since gone.   We (my sisters and I) decided it was a Christmas Party. Christmas Party favors and activities would be kid appropriate!  Although if you added up what was spent to buy all of the stuff for the Piñatas, we may have way overdone it! But oh my how fun it was to buy all of that “junk”!  Here is the thing, we were a bit nervous about whether the Piñata would work, I mean they have been here every year…they do have some serious gift expectations! But the Piñatas were a hit, all of them from age 2 to 15 they were in there laughing, whacking and scrambling through the loot…This may be the time to mention that some of the “loot” in the Piñatas really was “loot”,  it kind of insured high participation from all levels and ages! But it was so fun to watch and boy were they engaged in the whole thing….all of them!  Whew!!!  It worked!

So the kid’s manners and my gift purchasing/giving was no longer in the mix to worry about, and the vehicles do seem to be more reliable, the only thing to stress about was the potluck and the clothes with no stains. This year instead of making a dish I thought everyone else would like, I made what I liked… then….if no one liked it, I had some great leftovers that I wanted to bring home myself.  And the stainless clothes well…who cares now!

For the first time, really the first time I looked around and realized…THIS---THIS is fun, this is how a family Christmas party should be, I really had a great time…or maybe I am finally at a place that I do not worry or give a “rats ass” about what others are thinking or I will admit that “perfect family” performance, I was so sure was necessary, never really worked anyway! …. and that may be the best Christmas gift ever!

FA-LA-LA-LA

aka "Deck the Halls" Mannheim Steamroller