Less than two weeks till Christmas...

I don't have my shopping done yet. By "done yet," I mean that I haven't started. Eeek. If I don't do something soon, I might have to actually venture into a real store instead of shopping online as is my preference. Some of it, I think, is just that I'm having trouble getting into the spirit of the season this year. I don't know why. All the holiday plans were worked out with relatively little angst. I'm excited to see everyone, so I know that's not it. I don't know. I just feel kind of blah this year. Which sucks.

Christmas is usually my favorite time of year. People are nicer to one another (except when fighting to get the last whatever-the-popular-gift-is-this-year off the shelf). A woman actually gave me her parking space, a total primo one, at the mall this weekend. She saw me waiting in a line of cars to drive down yet another packed full row of parking, and she smiled at me, gestured at her car. I smiled, nodded and gave her the effusive thank you -- mouthed very widely-- so she wouldn't think I was just singing along to a song or something. Incidentally, I was at the mall -- also known as one of the circles of hell-- this weekend to buy a birthday present, not a Christmas present, in case you wondering if I was lying about not having started shopping yet. I'm not lying, unfortunately.

We had friends and family over on Saturday for a great dinner (NOT cooked by yours truly) and I broke out my traditional Christmas cookies -- the one thing I do actually make from scratch. I hope they had fun -- we had a wonderful time seeing all of them. Our friends and family, I mean, not the cookies. Though, I was happy to see them too. : )

I don't know -- does having children in your home make Christmas more Christmas-y? Most of the time, I'm pretty okay with our two person and two dog household, but Christmas always makes me wish there was a little kid who'd be excited and running around on Christmas morning.

Some of my favorite Christmas memories:
-All of us gathered around the tree, trying to determine the source of the mysterious popping noises emanating from the Christmas tree. The answer turned out to be something very logical; pinecones were reacting to the heat inside the house and opening up. It was not the sound of a light string shorting out and threatening to set the house on fire, as my mother and I were probably prone to believing. She and I are both worse case scenario junkies.

-Swiping un-iced Christmas cookies -- it's a long process over several days to make the cookies and there was usually one night in which the cookies were baked but un-iced and therefore vulnerable to swiping because once they were iced they were stored in a covered tin of some kind. I took a whole bunch of them, the little circle cookies that were actually the pieces of dough that came out of the middle of the wreath cookies, and stored them under my bed. Yuck. What can I say? I was nine and not so much worried about the cleanliness of this particular getaway.

-Walking into the living room, maybe even the same year as the Christmas cookie stealing, to see a Cabbage Patch doll preemie under the tree. Now, you have to understand that at the time, these things were plastic and fabric gold. You couldn't get one in the stores and there was no such thing as the internet yet. Except maybe at Al Gore's house. I'm not even sure I asked for the doll, knowing how impossible it was to get one. I'm unclear about my level of belief in Santa at this point, but at the time, it seemed like he came through for me, despite whatever doubts I had. Yea, Mom and Dad : ) That must suck sometimes that Santa gets all the credit for the gifts you so carefully picked out and worked hard to pay for.

-Going to my Grandma and Grandpa B.'s house. This happened a whole bunch of times. But among my favorites was the year my dad and uncles built this huge snowman in the backyard. It was like nine feet tall, or it seemed like it to me. I was, of course, sick that year. I always get sick around Christmas. So, I wasn't allowed to go out and join the fun, but I remember seeing it from inside the house, from Grandma's kitchen window. I also remember the year that my Grandpa got this game with these two tiny basketball hoops that attached to the table with suction cups. You had to bounce a ping pong ball into the hoop from the opposite end of the table to score points. Again, it was funny to see my uncles and my dad acting like kids, playing games. My grandpa always liked the games too, another reason it was fun. He so clearly got a kick out of playing and watching us play. I miss him a lot all the time, but especially around this time of year.

Okay, now that I have thoroughly saddened myself. I'm going home. : )