Christmas

This is going to sound odd, since I just wrote about our seventeenth anniversary but this Christmas will be our eighteenth together.  The numbers get muddled when you're married nine days before a major Holiday, because that Holiday is counted at the very beginning.

Anyway you look at it, that's a lot of Christmases together. 

Our first Christmas was actually spent in Vermont.  It was a whirl-wind, affair, throwing together another reception, along with the holiday together.  It was also our honeymoon, spent ever so romantically, in my hometown, because we could only afford one trip and the chance to see my family and celebrate our wedding took precedence.

Luckily Kent fell in love with Vermont.  Unfortunately we didn't have very many Christmases there because it was just to hard financially to travel and Kent couldn't get time off, since he worked retail so many years.  There was one Christmas, the year before Kate was born when Jane was almost two, when we were able to travel.  What glorious memories.  My dad joked with his friends to not be surprised if the house wasn't standing on December 26th.  You see, on top of Jane, there were Malcolm's twin girls that year and somehow my dad could picture the worst with those girlies. 

Amazingly enough, the house DID stay standing, my mom was able to do super fun things, like decorate sugar cookies with three toddlers and we all had loads of fun.

It's hard to mesh family traditions when you're married.  His family did things a certain way, my family did things a different way and somewhere we had to meet in the middle.  We had some years with it all being confused.  We spent many years going up to Kent's parents to open gifts and that was a special time, but as our family expanded it wasn't practical.  We decided after we purchased this house a bit over a decade ago that it was time for new traditions and that's when we started spending Christmas morning at our house.

It made sense since Christmas day was becoming our family day, leaving Christmas eve evening with Kent's family.  It works out well, especially now that my mom is here because we can spend time with everyone without feeling rushed.

The last few years we've had Christmas dinner at our house, but somehow I forgot about having Scott this year!  So we'll have dinner at my mom's.  It's just not possible to seat nine people around our table made for six.  Yes you read that right, I said six.  We squeeze seven, daily because there's no choice, with me always being the one stuck on the awkward corner.  When mom comes, we somehow manage to add her but that's the limit.

So dinner at mom's it is but Christmas morning will be here, mom and Scott will be joining us.  It should be hectic and chaotic and memorable and fun!  This year Christmas is on a Sunday.  I love Christmas on a Sunday.  Just an hour of church with a mostly musical celebration of the birth of our Savior and Lord. 

Christmas was on a Sunday the year the twins were born. 

That was a weird Christmas.  I had given birth via an emergency c-section a mere four days before after being on bed-rest for almost three solid months.  Getting the twins here was an emotional journey, it was difficult and we didn't know if the twins would be ours to raise or not.  It was like a thousand pound weight was off my shoulders when they were finally safe out of the toxic environment that was their womb with it's malfunctioning placenta and sleeping, growing and developing under the care of the nicu nurses.

I had a lot to be thankful for that Christmas.  My little babies born eight weeks to early obviously couldn't come home yet.  Their first Christmas was spent with IVs and feeding tubes, lots of wires that would suddenly startle us with bells and whistles, usually alerting the nurses that someone's breathing had stopped.

Yet there was something special that year.  An outpouring of love from strangers for the nicu babies.  Blankets and homemade gifts appeared for our boys.  Gift bags and stuffed animals.  Those angels made a difficult time just a little easier and I'll be forever grateful for what they did at that time.

I was released from the hospital on Christmas Eve.  I moved very S.L.O.W. that year but we had three other children in need of some special time.  Thank heavens my mom was here to help. 

Thankfully we only had to spend that one year with children in the hospital.  This year has the bonus of the twins finally being old enough to appreciate the holiday without the wanton destruction of years past.  Amazingly enough the tree has remained standing, although the ornaments have been relentlessly rearranged, I don't know if they'll survive.

There's also been an almost never-ending barrage of newly made treasures added daily.  Ean has also discovered what the "blinking" bulbs look like and for two solid days, there was a new part of the tree blinking.  Thankfully he's stopped that.

If any surprises come up, I'll be sure to blog it.  We never know what our family has in store for us!

Merry Christmas!