Christmas decompression

All the ingredients were there for this to be a really fantastic Christmas: good food, good company, mild weather, contagiously excited children, a pile of presents, a little drama in the form of a phone call from my sister's ex-boyfriend's inebriated mother...

And yet Christmas missed the mark for me a little bit this year.

Having caught a cold on the 23rd didn't help, and my husband having to work put a damper on things. My husband is a shift worker. He likes to point out that he has more time off in a year than most people because of it, but I like to point out that he misses a lot of events because there is no flexibility in shift work.

Then there was the production yesterday of going door-to-door in my neighborhood looking for my husband's brand new remote control helicopter that he lost control of and crashed.

This Christmas felt like a lot of work. A little bit like an overproduction. In truth, I feel like I am living in a Toys R' Us bomb crater with two excessively overtired cranky kids. I actually have to run out and buy some organizational units to be able to put away all the things my kids got (I'm making this sound like a bad thing. I'm actually one of those people who get warm fuzzies from the prospect of buying organizational units...).

A family in town lost their house Christmas Eve when their tree caught fire. I have a pantry and a fridge filled with more food than I can fit, and a basement overflowing with toys. I can't help but feel like I am living in excess. I've already started rounding up some toys for donation.

And I think that's where my post-Christmas melancholy really stems from. I feel like this was a Christmas of consumption. I can really feel God hammering away at me to give back. It's just not entirely clear to me what form that should take, but I can already tell this will be a big topic for me in the New Year.

I also think that ordering in Chinese food and having a Christmas movie marathon while feigning the flu so that we don't have to go anywhere or have anyone over, sounds like the way to go.