Oh, I love Christmas! I love the lights, I love the putting up the tree and decorations. I love listening to Christmas music, and love picking out the gifts. I even like wrapping the gifts! I love our traditions of the fun things we do at Christmas time. We decorate our gingerbread houses,and we make sugar cookies and other yummy treats. We like to read our Christmas books, and we deliver our secret gifts to our friends in the neighborhood. I love to go and see the lights at Temple square, and see the lights at Thanksgiving point, get our pictures taken with Santa, drink hot chocolate and go caroling.
I love EVERYTHING about Christmas! I love to sit under the tree and look at the sparkly lights, and think about the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ. I love being a part of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert. It’s a magical experience, and I can’t believe I am so lucky to be a part of it.
And then there’s the parties! We’ve got work parties, choir parties, church parties, family parties, preschool parties, class parties, birthday parties, friend parties, and youth parties. And the concerts! Band concerts, bell concerts, choir concerts, class programs and plays, the Gingerbread festival, etc.
The only problem is that all these things take time. There’s no possible way that one family can do ALL the things I would love to do to celebrate at Christmas time. And my family gets burned out with all the things I drag them to. I just wish we had more time!
How do you squeeze all the wonderful Christmas things into just the time you’ve got? Multi task?
OK, Kids, let’s all decorate the gingerbread houses WHILE we wrap the presents! And then we’re getting in the car to go look at lights, and while we’re driving, we’ll roll down the windows and sing Christmas carols to all the other people driving by! That’s it! Sing louder, kids!
Or we could just wait until school’s out, and then do Christmas things ALL day long for those three or four days before Christmas. Or even after Christmas, right? We can still do those fun things after the actual holiday, right? Or is that just wrong?
Or maybe I have to be all right with letting one or two things go if we don’t have time.
I am all for the multi-tasking. Invite the neighbors over to make candies while caroling and decorating cookies, gingerbread houses, etc. All at the same time decorating the house with lights and taking a second to observe them and wrapping up the presents, then giving them to eachother and writing the thank you notes. That can all be done in one FHE right? I have decided, deliver presents to those I can, wrap what I can, skip what I need to and be as selfish as I need to be to be able to spend time with my family doing what I want to do.
I’m glad I started my Christmas season the day after Thanksgiving this year. That way, I’ll have had all the time I needed to do everything I wanted.
Right?
It seems like the only Christmas parties I go to are the ones I throw. This Friday Tom is having all his students over for dinner an games, that’s like 30 college kids. The next Thursday is my PTSA dinner, 10 women, and I just sent out my new year’s invites. I wanna go to someone else’s party. 🙁 I am feeling very unloved.
We have something scheduled every night in December. No wonder I’m so exhausted in January.
Tina,
I don’t speak for Paige, but if you’re in the neighborhood, we’ll throw a party just for you. (and even invite you!)