Back from the Holidays

Hello, my friends; I pray you’re well and that yours was a bountiful, healthy, and happy holiday season.

Ours was the best. We had Christmas and the day after off from work (Beck and the boys go back to school tomorrow, the third), and we had just the best time.

We spent Christmas at home, just the four of us, and then her mom came up for dinner somewhere around four of five. We opened presents for a while, took a break to nosh on fruits and Christmas cookies, and then finished with the presents. The presents ended with a scavenger hunt–this is usually the case, maybe always. The hunt ended with a new treadmill, which all four of us have already used.

The scavenger hunt is evident of Becky’s all-in way of looking at Christmas. She loves her boys so, and her time to best show them that is in the month around Christmas and winter break. Christmas magic is gynormous in our house. There’s an advent calendar and another advent calendar that gives candy; each of the 12 days of Christmas, the boys both open a present, which is a Christmas story book. Many of the books are the same from year to year, but the three of them enjoy reading them again some nights before bed.

The delivery of most of the Christmas magic is Pipsqueak, the Elf on the Shelf. Pip is a big family favorite and has been for the six or eight years since he made the scene. Pip comes back every morning and affixes himself at a decent vantage point for keeping an eye on two boys, and in so doing he creates fun mischief. He brings hot cocoa and breakfast sweets and stages grand snowball fights, using every size marshmallow, all of the boys’ Marvel action figures, and the majority of the dining room floor for a day.

He gets tangled in the red lights that he streams around the living room and spends a day hanging upside down. Then of course, he’ll right himself after he comes back from his nightly powwow with Santa at the North Pole.

And it’s just all fun throughout, and this year we got along so well. The boys, Finn’s now 11 and Simon is 7, are at that age where they love each other more than anything except for bugging the piss out of each other. Keeping that in check was central to our family harmony on Christmas day, and Beck and I stayed on it pretty strictly and didn’t give them the two minutes it would take to get back to doing that thing they both so love, bugging the piss out of each other.

And that was Christmas, we were together and we were happy. Becky’s dad and her sister and two of her kids came for a couple of days after Christmas, which stretched out the festivities that much longer, and then we’re working and off to the new year. Now here it is the second day of the new year, and another holiday season has almost come and gone.

But it ain’t over yet. We have today, and you can ask Simon what we’re gonna do, and he’ll tell you…”Something fun.”

I love you people, and I’m so pleased you’ve stopped by and given me a bit of your time. I really do pray for you, and I’ll let you in on a little secret, it helps. Whether anyone will ever discern how it helps doesn’t matter, only that it does. It does. It helps.