Have Yourself A Mellow Little Christmas

After the insanity of this crazy year, it was nice to hunker down and just have a small our-family-only Christmas. We had virtually no plans, other than to open presents in the morning and eat something in the afternoon, and that was really nice.

The kids as usual popped out of bed bright and early, but in a ritual common to cruel and heartless parents everywhere, we kept them pinned down upstairs until Wayne had his coffee and I had my tea in hand and we were both more or less awake.


One very sweet thing I thought about this Christmas is that after emptying out their stockings and finding a candy cane or chocolate to chow on, the first thing they wanted to do was to open presents from each other. Both had done a stealth job of wrapping to disguise size and shape of presents, using multiple boxes, bags, tape, etc. This cracked me up, and reminded me of last year when Mackenzie swore for weeks ahead of time that he was giving Asa an onion for Christmas, and actually wrapped one up as a gag before giving her his true present.

After that was out of the way, they opened their Santa gifts. Well, opened isn't really the right word for Mackenzie has he got a note from Santa saying his present wouldn't fit through the chimney!


After a summer spent borrowing my mom's kayak at every opportunity, I guess Santa figured that he would really enjoy his own, and if you look at his grin here you know that he will.

And Asa's expression in this photo more or less spells out "A karaoke machine? OMG!" She was beyond thrilled, and has been singing day and night ever since (not that she doesn't sing day and night anyways, but now she's mic'd.)

And that, plus a turkey dinner in the afternoon was more or less our Christmas. Small, mellow, fun and family. In the week leading up, we celebrated the solstice with a progressive dinner with neighborhood friends, baked cookies, sang carols, decorated, read books about the Christmas story and in general just enjoyed all of the rituals of the season as well as celebrating the reason for the season.