christmas...

seems kind of a blur now.

for several reasons, it didn't feel all that much like a normal christmas....we were in a rental house...i had to work right up until the weekend...no trip for me and daddy to pick out a much too big tree for our house...no weeks of prepartory gingerbread baking with rachel...no christmas eve service...no fireside naps with our pets on the floor (it was 73 degrees).

now, i'm not complaining....even by my obsessive proverbial standards for holiday cheer, it wasn't a bad christmas by any means...just sort of weird.

some normal-cy was acheived when, as usual, our family complied with the unspoken southern rule that every holiday meal must contain: collard greens, congealed jello salad, and pecan pie. sort of like a food version of the trinity. yum.
and of course we had the usual hysterically funny comments from my family:

Nana: "I think the funniest hurricane was that one a while back...Hugo?"
BoDaddy: "There was nothing funny about that hurricane!....All those darn people from Charleston drove to Walterboro and bought all our bread!"
(you can see that, despite my grandpa's apparent 17 year grudge about the lack of carbohydrates left for the poor residents of the 'boro, they were both very concerned for everyone's well being during one of the worst storms to hit Charleston.)

this was the first christmas in a long time that our tree did not fall over. strange accidental tradition i know, but in recent years we have had to resort to tieing it to a door. and it didn't fall over because this year our tree was a 2 foot plastic one (gasp! in my eyes this was christmas blasphemy) that was perched atop the entertainment center along with all our presents due to the spaztic tail movements of our new puppy.

but despite all the weirdness, i still got so excited on christmas eve that i hardly slept at all. i LOVE christmas...and as long as i can remember i have always been the first one awake. in the middle of the night, i tiptoe out to the den to just look at the tree and the lights and just listen... to the silence.

christmas eve is always so quiet...so still. when i was little, i used to wake up to make 100% sure that yes, Santa had come and then I would go back to sleep happy....Now when i wake up, i sit in the dark and think about things....about my family...about the past year...about what was going through mary and joseph and everyone's minds thousands of years ago. about how they had no idea what their miracle in a cave really meant for the world.

and then i climb back in bed and try to sleep for a few hours until i hear the rustlings of someone else awake...fixing coffee...putting something good smelling in the oven....and then the craziness of christmas begins.

i hope you had a merry christmas.