It is almost unreal when a day that required so much preparation has come and gone in the blink of an eye. This year it really hit me that these Christmas times when everything is special and magic are a fleeting thing. It was worse than getting kicked in the gut, or turning 34. One day I too will have a living room filled with self-entitled teenagers who literally expect nothing less than the latest 400.00 portable video game player that does your homework and picks up hot chicks for you.

This year the big demand was for a 30.00 RC Spiderman plane and a Weeble tree house. As usual Hipster D and I went a little crazy buying everything we saw that we would have wanted if we were an almost 4 year old and 1 and 1/2 respectively. My house looks like the bowels of Toys R Us cracked open and showered down a teeming hell rain of plastic, battery eating objects.
This will go down as a Christmas to remember for several reasons. The first of which, we stayed at home the entire day. We were about 5 minutes from out the door when we received a phone call that my niece was sick and they were on their way to the emergency room. Of course since she is 21 and was complaining of a stiff neck, meningitis was mentioned. Needless to say, we decided to kick it at the crib. Five hours later it was decided that it was merely a bad sinus infection and oh how we all laughed (bullshit!). We had spent the entire morning baking cookies and making yummy garlic mashed potatoes for jack. No, no one in our family is named Jack.

After living like I had a clean up staff all morning, we discovered we mysteriously had no hot water. What we didn’t immediately realize was that we had no heat either. Thank god it has been unusually warm the past few days, but no heat sucks anytime it isn’t August. Several days of boiling wash water “Little House on the Prairie” style we are finally back on dishwasher mode.

It’s hard when you put so much in these “magical” Christmases, wanting everything to be special and memorable. You never know what these kids are going to come up with in therapy one day. This Christmas wasn’t anymore especially horrible than any other day where a smattering of things go wrong. It was just more noticeable because with small children, you spend the entire year dreaming of how perfect it will be for them. It’s like how girls dream of their wedding day, go nuts planning it, and then you finally find out that when you are actually marrying the right person, it’s so huge the entire day is like a dream. Hipster D still has to ask me whether or not certain people were at our wedding because you really just don’t remember all the little details. I guess the kids won’t remember any of the little things either, and when you take out those, this Chrsitmas rocked!