Christmas 2009

Posted on 7th January 2010 in Holidays

Christmas felt a little different this year. My Mom and Geoff are building a house in Washington, and they started before Christmas last year. The house still isn’t done, and they were dyin’ for some time to work on it. Geoff is a school administrator, so Christmas is when he has lots of time off. They usually come to Utah every Christmas to spend time with all us kids, but this year they really had no choice but to take advantage of the time off he had to make progress on their house. They came for Thanksgiving (and Pie Day) this year, but stayed in Washington for Christmas.

So, it was all our first Christmas without our Mom.

Ever.

Maybe we are really lucky to even get them every year… maybe lots of people don’t get to spend Christmas with their nearest and dearest? But it was a new feeling for us. (Us meaning Me and my Siblings.)

Another thing, a huge thing, was that it was also Steve’s first Christmas without his Dad, who passed away last March.

So yeah, Christmas felt a little different this year. The missing parents combined with a slightly higher level of holiday family drama made for a very different “feel” this year.

But there were really great things about Christmas this year too! It was the first year Steve and I have had Christmas in our new house, and we were even able to find a way to get a Christmas Tree that we could keep the cats away from. When we lived in the condo we didn’t really have space for a tree, and when we tried to put up a small artificial one, Bug and Sooki would knock the thing over daily, and Bug would chew on it and eat the little plastic needles, which made him barf everywhere. We haven’t had a tree for years because of this.

But this year we bought a great artificial tree with “tougher” plastic needles, (harder to chew through) and also discovered ssscat, which is going to be a new Christmas staple in our household. Ssscat is a genius little product. It’s a can of compressed air attached to a motion detector that sprays air at the cats when they get too close and scares them away. Totally harmless, sounds like a hiss, works like a charm! After setting it off once or twice, they stayed far away from the tree. Ssscat also scared the living hell out of every single person who forgot it was there and walked in front of the tree. Really, hilarious to witness.

With the new house and a gorgeous tree, and much more space to sleep guests, we were able to “host” some of the Christmas festivities this year. Usually when my Mom is in town we all gather at my brothers apartment for Christmas morning to open presents, hang out together, and eat Mom’s famous Christmas Crepes. Obviously we couldn’t do that this year, but I didn’t want to lose the tradition. So we recreated it at our house.

But of course the Christmas festivities started with our beloved German Christmas tradition, celebrating with the Mahler side of the family for Christmas Eve at my Dad’s house. It’s something we’ve done with Oma and Opa and the Mahler family since before I was born, and is one of my family’s most cherished traditions. We ate Oma’s famous ham rolls, ate too much chocolate, opened presents, and of course ended the night with a game of bingo.

The best part of the whole evening was when little 3-year-old Colette handed out the presents she personally picked out for each one of us. Nancy had taken her to the dollar store, and asked her, one by one, “Okay, what do you want to get for [insert name here]?” Colette then walked around the store and carefully picked out an item for that person. Nancy didn’t question any of the selections, she just wrapped them and labeled them, and Colette handed them out to each of us. The gifts were hilarious… Weston got a Shrek bracelet, Opa got a blue furry purse, I got a Micky Mouse recorder, Steve got a one-button calculator that looked like an iPod, Heather got baby socks, Eric got a pink book about kitties… every single present was awesome. It was adorable.

After the Christmas Eve festivites, Heather and Cory came with Steve and I and slept at our house. Christmas morning they woke up to Candy Canes hanging on their bedroom doorknobs, and stockings full of random stuff from “Santa”.

Around noon, Eric, Christine and Colette came over. We opened presents, and we made Mom’s Christmas Crepes.

Mom and Geoff were with us during the “opening presents” part of Christmas morning… over Ustream. We set up a live feed with Steve’s Macbook, and they were able to be there with us over the interwebs. It was really nice having them there in some way! We kept walking the Macbook around to point it at the action. Haha…

After Eric & Christine left, the four of us drove to Bountiful to have Christmas Dinner with the Baumans. They’ve got the biggest dining table I’ve ever seen… but the Bauman family is growing so rapidly, we still barely all fit around the table! We were joking that nobody else is allowed to have any kids, because we have no room. (No arguments from me there!)

After an absolutely delicious dinner, we opened more gifts, and hung out – everyone pooped from all the Christmas runaround.

We all went home shortly after in hopes that we’d have enough energy (and time) to catch a movie. But by the time we pulled into our warm cozy house, and saw the glowing light inside, and the cold sparkling blue frozen outside, we all wanted nothing more than to stay cozy inside, and hit the hay.

See ya, Christmas. Til next year…

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 11:45 am and is filed under Holidays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.