Christmas Traditions.......

After dinner tonight my stepfather wanted us to open our christmas presents tonight. It turned out that he just wanted my mom to open hers, so she was the only one......so anyway, my sister came home from GA and so we are all sitting in the front room and I'm just sitting there thinking to myself....Andi and Tamara asked Scott and myself a question one night while we were at Friday's. What are some of your favorite Christmas traditions? I sat there and listened to the three of them tell thier stories while I thought about it. I really don't have any, it really bumbed me out too. I mean, when I have kids, I totally want to be completely exhausted from having so much fun with them and have fun traditions they will grow to love so they can sit with thier friends at dinner some night and tell them all how great they think Christmas is and how much fun they have. So anyway, my family is pretty disfunctional in the first place, so we don't really have "traditions" unless you call going to a relative's house every year a tradition. It's not a very exciting thing to me though....it's just something we do. But anyway, pretty much the past three weeks have been filled with me thinking about SOMETHING I think is fun that we always do every Christmas. So back to tonight, here I am sitting down listening to my sister and my mom talk about stuff. My mom had to buy a star for the top of the tree, she couldn't find the angel she normaly puts on. Well my sister put the new star on the tree this morning. My mom said "yeah, it sucks!! I can't find the angel anywhere!!" my sister replies "WHAT?? That sucks!!! I wondered why we had this cheesy star." I then realized how much my sister loves to decorate the tree and at least some of the house....so does my mom....then I realized why I don't really get into it....it's because I'm the guy they make do all the work. My mom thinks she has all these wonderful organizational skills, but no. When I try to explain how to better organize things she doesn't understand why I would do it that way then she just does whatever anyway.....which is just about never the best way. So my tradition, if I like it or not, is getting the tree (upstairs if we decide to use the fake one, or pick a real one up), getting the ornaments from the basement, untangle all the lights, find and change burned out lightbulbs, attach new hooks for the ornaments, take all the empty boxes back downstairs....basically I do ALL the grunt work and end up having to work around EVERY obstical my mom has in the way while she complains and gets frustrated that I put things in the wrong place for her, or when I move things to clear a better path to make it easier for myself or at least make room for all these things I have to carry up and downstairs, then she gets even more frustrated if I get frustrated at the slightest thing. It's really depressing, but i guess that's why I don't have any fun memories of all these great traditions. So, I pray that when I'm a husband and father, that even though I'll still end up doing all that stuff....I would like to have a partner in crime who either helps or at least appreciates what I do to help and lets me do it in a way that's easiest, AND lets me join in and do fun stuff too AND lets me help put a smile on my childs face too doing all those fun stuffs and little things with them, because I think that would be the best part of Christmas for me (other than Jesus of course) as a husband and father, having fun with my family AS a family.



AHHAAA!!! On my way back from the airport with my sister (we went to see if her bags came in yet) we were talking and I realized something. When we go to my stepfather's dad's house Christmas day, there is a family that is usually there. I don't know the parent's names but thier two daughters are Riley (I think) and Kiley (I think). None of them really talk to me, other than hellos and goodbyes. But I realized tonight that for some reason I really like seeing them there even though we never talk. It's not an excited "WOOHOOO!!!" more like a "hmm, there they are." kind of pleasant feeling.