1) Fort Wayne apparently has the most satisfied renters, according to a website apartmentratings.com. Oddly enough when breaking the story, WANE.COM posted pictures of my old apartment complex, Preston Pointe..you know, the one I blogged about last year complaining about a nearby meth lab. Lovely. Just goes to show how desparate Fort Wayners are. As I drove home today...and by drove I mean blew, I thought about how breezy my old apartment was. It was so bad we had to hang old comforters over the doorways and windows to keep the wind from blowing the blinds around! It was horrible. It makes me grateful to have been able to move into my house, keep my house even this summer when Aaron was gone, and give my kids more space (and warmth) than where we had been living!
2) I'm so tired of hearing people complain about the weather. Students call on an hourly basis, trying to find out if we're going to close campus early. It's WIND people! Sadly, it's only December 9th. What are these folks going to do when winter REALLY sets in? Oy!
3) This fireplace in my living room is really drying out my throat. No more fires :(
4) Tonight is the season finale of Glee. Can you say "SECTIONALS!!!"
5) Why are people NOT working? I mean, I KNOW the economy is HORRIBLE, but it's Christmas season--- EVERY retail store is hiring. GO WORK! UGH! I'm just so tired of hearing about how people don't want to go work because they don't want to lose their unemployment. I guess I just don't understand.
6) Been trying to think of a Christmas (or Christmas eve) tradition to start with the kids. I'll buy new Christmas jammies for them to open on Christmas eve, but other than that....any ideas?
5 comments:
did you get the PJ idea from modern family?!
maybe you could do a "polar express" tradition....i'll explain it to you later! i loved doing it with my kids!
No, we did PJ's the first year with Lilly (at Mom's!) Don't you remember? They were cheap jammies from Old Navy..the tore in like an hour! It's the ones she's wearing in the picture with her and Gigi (when Grandma is wearing the purple outfit).
Oh yes, I can't wait to hear the Polar Express tradtion! Email me!
Gretchen,
Each year each of our kids get a special ornament that they get to open on Christmas eve morning and hang on the tree. Andy buys me an Ornament and I buy him one too. We try to make it significant to something they have been interested in or had fun doing throughout the year. For example, this year, Raynah has develloped a true love and adoration for TINKERBELL! So this year, I found the Hallmark Tinkerbell ornament for her. I started this particular tradition because I remember my very 1st Christmas away from home, I had no tree, because I was a poor broke college student with no money to afford ornaments. So each year the kids get an ornament so that when they leave home, they will have enough ornaments to fill a small tree of their very own. :) Also, each ornament tells a story about a year of their life. This was the year I was really into Spiderman, tinkerbell, or this is the year that I started playing the guitar, or loved GLEE! :) LOL You have the ornaments, the memories, and it is a great way to decorate your tree too with new ornaments for your tree every year. :)
I thought that you would enjoy reading this story as well. It is going to become a new tradition for Andy in our house every year. :) Maybe you could make it a tradition in yours as well.
[ Note: This story below was written by Nancy Gavin and originally published in the December 14, 1982 issue of Woman's Day magazine. ]
FOR THE MAN WHO HATED CHRISTMAS
It’s just a small, white envelope stuck among the branches of our Christmas tree. No name, no identification, no inscription. It has peeked through the branches of our tree for the past ten years or so.
It all began because my husband Mike hated Christmas--oh, not the true meaning of Christmas, but the commercial aspects of it--overspending... the frantic running around at the last minute to get a tie for Uncle Harry and the dusting powder for Grandma---the gifts given in desperation because you couldn’t think of anything else.
Knowing he felt this way, I decided one year to bypass the usual shirts, sweaters, ties and so forth. I reached for something special just for Mike. The inspiration came in an unusual way.
Our son Kevin, who was 12 that year, was wrestling at the junior level at the school he attended; and shortly before Christmas, there was a non-league match against a team sponsored by an inner-city church. These youngsters, dressed in sneakers so ragged that shoestrings seemed to be the only thing holding them together, presented a sharp contrast to our boys in their spiffy blue and gold uniforms and sparkling new wrestling shoes. As the match began, I was alarmed to see that the other team was wrestling without headgear, a kind of light helmet designed to protect a wrestler’s ears.
It was a luxury the ragtag team obviously could not afford. Well, we ended up walloping them. We took every weight class. And as each of their boys got up from the mat, he swaggered around in his tatters with false bravado, a kind of street pride that couldn’t acknowledge defeat.
Mike, seated beside me, shook his head sadly, “I wish just one of them could have won,” he said. “They have a lot of potential, but losing like this could take the heart right out of them.” Mike loved kids - all kids - and he knew them, having coached little league football, baseball and lacrosse. That’s when the idea for his present came. That afternoon, I went to a local sporting goods store and bought an assortment of wrestling headgear and shoes and sent them anonymously to the inner-city church. On Christmas Eve, I placed the envelope on the tree, the note inside telling Mike what I had done and that this was his gift from me. His smile was the brightest thing about Christmas that year and in succeeding years. For each Christmas, I followed the tradition--one year sending a group of mentally handicapped youngsters to a hockey game, another year a check to a pair of elderly brothers whose home had burned to the ground the week before Christmas, and on and on.
The envelope became the highlight of our Christmas. It was always the last thing opened on Christmas morning and our children, ignoring their new toys, would stand with wide-eyed anticipation as their dad lifted the envelope from the tree to reveal its contents.
As the children grew, the toys gave way to more practical presents, but the envelope never lost its allure. The story doesn’t end there.
You see, we lost Mike last year due to dreaded cancer. When Christmas rolled around, I was still so wrapped in grief that I barely got the tree up. But Christmas Eve found me placing an envelope on the tree, and in the morning, it was joined by three more.
Each of our children, unbeknownst to the others, had placed an envelope on the tree for their dad. The tradition has grown and someday will expand even further with our grandchildren standing to take down the envelope.
Mike's spirt like the Christmas spirt will always be with us.
Latesha Martin
We've done new jammies on Christmas Eve for about 5 or 6 years now! They look forward to it every year!
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