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Saturday, December 22, 2007

Warm Holiday Welcomes

The blending of two people or of two families can be fun but can have a few bumps along the road to say the least. Although my husband is Jewish, Santa used to visit his house when he and his brother were young.

Our first Christmas together Santa decided to visit our house as well. Santa filled the Big Giraffe's stocking with candy and small items and left a couple of presents under the tree. (The Big Giraffe and I exchanged gifts as well.) Santa left candy in my stocking and nothing under the tree. The next year Santa didn't leave the Big Giraffe as much but he left me more. Of course there were also issues with how Santa would wrap one of our presents, but not wrap the other. I'll leave you to guess who got the unwrapped gifts. We figured we would sort out the whole Santa thing before we had kids. Then we realized that actually we had quite a bit of time before they really caught on, although this year our older son (OS) is keeping a keen eye out for any Santa details. Most importantly we have been able to try out different traditions and see what we like and what we don't and change it. One year Santa didn't wrap any of OS's presents. It worked out well for Santa because he was a lot less stressed. However, the next year OS disregarded his birthday gifts in favor of the wrapping paper so Santa decided to wrap his gifts. We haven't received word yet on what Santa will do this year. I do remind OS that I am a personal friend of Santa's so I expect I'll be hearing soon.

Of course there are other traditions that are still works in progress. Like any great work, there's a lot of mulling, pondering, discussion and yes even arguing. You know that song the Twelve Pains of Christmas? Well tonight we lived that song, or at least the day of Christmas about the Christmas lights. We have yet to work out a good system, much less a good arrangement for our Christmas lights. Because of where our outlets are placed, it's hard for us to do anything too exciting without creating a dizzying array of daisy-chained extension cords in front of our doors. We want our lights to invite warm holiday feelings, not vicious lawsuits. As such, it's hard for us to get really excited about our lights. However, we're usually pretty good about getting them up early.

Not this year. We were great about getting and decorating our tree early. The lights were another story. Normally when the Big Giraffe hangs the lights from our gutters, he does a final gutter clean. This year we waited until late December, in fact today. Due to the weather this past week, our gutter was completely frozen. This meant that not only was he not able to clean our gutter, but we couldn't even hang the lights from the gutter. Hence, our lights are on our bushes. No big deal except that today it warmed up and all the ice that was in our gutter somehow, and I'm exactly sure how yet, managed to leak through our living room window and onto our couch. Hence an emergency call (read expensive) to our friendly handyman who's swinging by tomorrow. Fortunately it's freezing outside, so the ice is freezing again, thus stopping the leak.

How could I forget to mention that it's also the holidays? So while the Big Giraffe and I are truly the best of friends and partners in life, we may just possibly have gotten into a slight tiff audible disagreement about all of this. Wouldn't you know that a friend of ours just happened to drop-off a plate of cookies during the fight?

A. Elliot's Lesson Learned: Buy curtains and soundproof your doors!

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posted by Alex Elliot @ 10:40 PM   3 comments
3 Comments:

  • At 12/23/2007 4:24 AM, Blogger Chantelle said…

    Awe, don't you love the holidays. It is a joyful kind of stress. (Been catching up on the past blog entries too.)

     

  • At 12/23/2007 7:46 AM, OpenID cablegirl said…

    oh there's nothing I hate more than being busted in a disagreement with CableDad in front of a friend.

    If it makes you feel any better I only just put my wreath up on the door yesterday. :)

     

  • At 12/23/2007 8:40 AM, Blogger Suzanne said…

    Nothing like Christmas lights to bring on the stress. That's why I decided to assume control of the process. Things are much more peaceful now that there's juse one of us involved!

     
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Name:Alex Elliot
Home:MA, United States
About Me:Professional Mom of two cats, a dog, an ant farm, and oh yeah...two boys: a 6 year old and a 3 year old. Also found in my house is my husband who is known on this blog as The Big Giraffe.
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For those of us who didn't get an instruction manual with our babies and for whom parenting hasn't always gone as planned. On a more serious note this blog is about supporting a woman's ability to make her own choices about parenting including the choice, for whatever reason, to bottle feed her babies formula.

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