A Story of Survival!

Historically, Christmas around my/our family has been insane. For my entire life, my memories of Christmas encompass a lot of food, excitement and waiting for the adults to eat to go open presents, and when we got there, so many presents we couldn't hardly stand it. Another tradition that we always had was at the family Christmas to open gifts one person at a time. The good years, we'd open them from youngest to oldest. The bad years, the oldest person would start. That often left us youngsters with elevated blood pressures and insane desire by the time it was our turn. Luckily, I don't remember many of those.

Nonetheless, there were always so many presents we could hardly open them all. Our little fingers were bloody stumps from opening by the time we got to the bottom of our stack. And that tradition, apparently, is continuing. Years ago, like when I was still to little to be bummed out about it, someone said "we're not doing Christmas like this anymore - it'll be one gift a piece..."

Again, that was definitely at least before I could drive... probably earlier. And it still hasn't happened. Now don't get me wrong - I appreciate all the time, effort, work, headaches, shopping trips, and late night wrappings that go into such a celebration - but it's crazy! The kids love it (obviously) because it's as if Santa dropped a Toys R Us satellite store right there in the middle of Grandma's living room. This year, my best gift was the photobook I made for my beautiful Grandma using Shutterfly's album design site. Here's a link to it if you're interested... it really turned out nice. If you ever need a meaningful gift for someone who has all they need, this is the way to go. It took a total of about 12 hours to finish from scanning the first picture to finally ordering it, but it was worth it...

Anyway, we had a lot of fun, everyone's exhausted, and we get to do it again, today, if the inch thick ice ever melts on the roads so we can make it to Chesterton... I'll post pics when it's all over...

Hope everyone's holiday was filled with memories as fond as mine...