Christmas Eve Eve
This is the kind of sky we have tonight in the Midwest. This was at sunset. I looked out the kitchen window and everything seemed pink. So when I went outside this is what I saw. Facing southwest. This is taken with the camera and the color has not been altered at all. It’s the color of all my dreams. As it is, and has been every year, for most of my life, Christmas is really more than one day. All the prep stuff is done. The kids are finally off of school. They kept them down to the wire this year. They leave with their dad tomorrow and return to me Christmas Day in the afternoon. We try to keep it as stress free as possible for them. Lots of people travel and my kids have spent many a Christmas Eve traveling on long, cold, dark and icy roads to get shuttled back and forth between his family and mine. Thanks to my sisters and brothers and their new families, compromises needed to made, and I am able to now forfeit the 24th in order to get the 25th and more. Once you give up the notion of Christmas morning it’s really quite magical and it seems like Christmas lasts, like it’s longer somehow. Christmas night, when all of the lights are on and everyone is warm and cozy and tired from the last two days, is when I finally get my real gift. Just us. Being together. Talking about everything that happened while we open our little presents to each other. Laughing so hard that sometimes I just can’t believe I brought these two clever and humorous children into this world. As the years have gone by they started focusing more on the stockings and what was inside them. It’s funny because even though Santa fills them up, I seem to spend an awful lot of time thinking about the things that go into them. They’ve become more important than any actual present. It feels so quiet and peaceful to be awake as most everyone else is getting ready to sleep and say goodnight to another Christmas. This year my family is celebrating on Monday the 26th. It works out really well with family and work schedules. No stress of other places to go or a big meal to cook. We’re doing appetizers and desserts only. Which makes it even better! Everyone is always sick and stuffed to the gills with fat Christmas dinners and we all know that appetizers and desserts are the best part of a party anyway. I get to hang out with all my sisters and brother and all the kids. It’s loud and crazy and never boring. Then on Tuesday we all get to go back to our regular lives for another year. Every year I say I would love to go to a place where they don’t celebrate Christmas at all. Preferably a place that is warm and has a beach and an ocean, because it just becomes too much and not very special at all. But secretly…no, even secretly I still wish I could go anywhere else but here. Luckily though I am easily persuaded. With a few good songs and some well placed advertising and sitcom episodes, that Christmas spirit grabs me by the heartstrings and yanks me right back in. What a sucker. As usual, I have typed way too much and I am tired. Besides it’s Christmas Eve now. I am going to try and post pictures throughout the next few days as this holiday wraps and folds around me, but you know how that can go. So, from me and mine, to you and all of yours, I wish you the very merriest of Christmases. Pay attention and find the joy wherever it may be. I believe in the good. I truly truly do because you just never know. Peace.
just shy of pretty 
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