Crazy Christmases

It's nearly midnight in Texas and Santa Clause here has to go stuff stockings. It was a good Christmas Eve today, though I've been a bit tired and feeling still a bit melancholy over the events of the past week. I also found out this week that someone I dated in high school and who was at the center of a serious high school drama involving date rape, suicide attempts and yours truly died of lung disease a couple of years ago. This guy was not the perpetrator but was there, and well the story is told elsewhere on this blog (on my birthday, a couple years ago). Death can come like a thief in the night, and all I know is that while I have breath, I want to truly live.

The folks and the kids and I went to church service and that was lovely. Then we had lasagna and the kids opened a present each. Tomorrow we'll open everything. When I was a kid, we used to open presents on Christmas Eve because my uncle's bday was Christmas Day, but we'd open all our stocking presents on Christmas morning. They were all wrapped up and I loved opening the wrapping paper on each tiny little gift tucked in my stocking (except the one Christmas my mom actually gave me a lump of coal - and that was it). I used to do this micro-wrapping for the kids, but to be honest, I can't be bothered anymore! I don't have the time or the patience... I wrap the big ones under the tree and tonight I plan to just stuff everything into the stocking unwrapped.

I never told the kids about Santa Clause. I mean they knew the story but I never deceived them into thinking a big man in a red suit was coming down the chimney and giving us a bunch of presents. I feel that kids should be taught truth...

I'm ok with whatever everyone else's decisions are for that issue, but my mom likes to tell me (every Christmas) how my kids missed out on so much because I didn't tell them about Santa Clause. What they didn't miss out on was the awful disappointment kids get when they learn that it's all a lie, and Santa isn't "real"!! I want my kids to believe in God - an invisible omniscient and omnipresent being of light and goodness and love and truth. That is hard enough. Why teach them then about something that you know isn't real, and then reveal it's all been a big myth after all? What then will they think about God?

So of course my mom doesn't get all this... but I really don't appreciate her telling me every year that I've deprived my kids of something... I said mom you're basically telling me I'm a bad parent. She said "No I'm not, that's not what I'm saying." There was something else... I can't remember but it ended with me saying, "Denial is not a river in Egypt!" (I love that saying but it took me many years to GET what it meant because I didn't get the connection between Denial and The Nile - I'm a little slow, what can I say) ;)

So far this actually means we're getting along well this holiday. I'm serious! This is a big improvement from the Christmas everyone in the house got in a huge fight, my aunt slapped me (or hit me? I can't remember), I took a swing back but got intercepted by my uncle, everyone cried, people left the house, and in the end everything was my fault... Needless to say, I've always been the family scapegoat.

I better go be Santa. I'm putting on my Santa hat now...