Commuting and Cartoons: A Very Merry Christmas

My family rotates the cooking of Christmas Eve dinner so this year I was “off”. Yay!! No cooking for me! Well, I did do appetizers on Christmas Day, but that’s nothing compared to the feast I prepared last year for Christmas Eve. I did a little baking for a cookie swap I participated in and made the chocolate candies I always make, but other than that I didn’t bake/cook as much as I normally do. Christmas crept up on me so quick this year. It probably was the unseasonably warm weather (um, 60 degrees in December in NY?!?!) that kept me in denial that Christmas was so close. Before I knew it I was up until 1:30 am December 23^rd wrapping gifts.

My son was very much into Santa this year and so I started a few fun Santa traditions: the elf on the shelf, writing letters to Santa and we continued the milk & cookies tradition. For the letters I found a local charity run Santa’s mailbox that mails back personalized letters from Santa!! Very cool and was a huge hit with A. I also made him a video on the Portable North Pole, did a personalized phone call from Santa and we tracked Satna on Norad the entire night of Christmas Eve.

A was a very lucky boy and once again was completely spoiled by our families! Every year seems to be better than the last in terms of his excitement. If last year I had categorized it as a “Thomas Christmas”, well then this year was a “~~Super Hero~~ Batman Christmas”. We now are the proud owners of a batcave, batmobile, batplane, joker-mobile, and a myriad of super hero action figures (with all their little weapons) which I will continue to trip on for months to come. My favorite gift that I got A was a PB chair that I got during their secret sale, which of course got one glance from A and an “it’s ok…” out of him and he went back to playing with Batman. To my surprise he opened gifts in record time. I had visions of it taking us hours like last year and A wanting us to open each toy as he unwrapped it. Nope. Each gift was ripped open, slid across the wood floor and it was onto the next. After they were all unwrapped he strategically decided what to play with first. LOL

The excitement as he opened each, however, was priceless. It made the craziness and stress of all my late nights working over the past month just melt away. One of my most special gifts I received was a necklace that my son picked out himself. My husband went online to buy me earrings and when my son saw him shopping he wanted to buy something different for me – and it is gorgeous. Spending happy quality time with my family makes everything that I do throughout the year all worth it.

Merry Christmas!!