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So despite my unsettled feelings about religion, I’m a huge fan of Christmas. I imagine it pisses some people off to know that I secularize such an important holiday, but I can’t help it. It has all of the elements that I love: gaudy decorations, days off of work and school, pretty music, funny movies, hanging out with my family, presents, huge meals, cookies, candy, and really early acceptable drinking times. As long as I’m not actively being evil, I think I get to do Christmas until Christ Himself comes to my house and demands a birthday cake, at which point I will make Him such an awesome cake that He’ll drop and give me 40 rosaries and 10 Hail Marys right there.

Anyway, yes. Christmas. It was pretty good, but was generally kind of a bummer because on Christmas Eve morning, my grandfather fell. He’s 88 years old, in excellent health both physically and mentally, doesn’t take any medications, exercises every day, and still works 40 hours a week. That morning, he went for his constitutional, and tripped. He had to drive himself back to his house because no one was around and my grandmother doesn’t drive. When they got to the hospital, they diagnosed him with a dislocated shoulder and a black eye. Not the most pleasant outcome but definitely not the worst. During tests, however, they discovered an irregular heartbeat and informed him that he would need to be in the hospital for a few days to correct it. He came home yesterday and is doing well, but he had to spend Christmas in the hospital and my grandmother, being how she is, never left his side. I’m, of course, glad that he’s okay but it wasn’t the same not to have them around.

Despite that and a soul-crushing trip to Macy’s the week before, we gathered up all of our Christmas spirit and prepared to enjoy the shit out of some presents.

It helped that our tree this year is, I think, the best one that we’ve had.

It smells amazing and has barely lost any needles. I am now basically this lady:

Plus, we got some of those LED lights this year and they’re so pretty. I hope that they make up for the fact that we don’t have any decorations outside because the pre-lit garland things that usually adorn our front door became the focus of my attention after the aforementioned, ill-fated trip to Macy’s that made me hate everyone on the planet (more). The garlands are now sitting in a pile on the porch after they were ripped from their posts around the door for such crimes as, “Not keeping their green whore asses up where they’re supposed to,” and “HOW MANY OF THESE STUPID BULBS ARE BURNT OUT?!??!”

The baby had a pretty good Christmas, presents-wise. We are navigating the murky waters of whether or not to believe in Santa and his age being a weird, in-between one…too old for most toys but too young for just clothes and whatnot. We ended up giving him a lot of stuff that’s tied to specific interests of his, namely Monty Python, Star Wars, and WWE.

I think we’re sticking with Santa for now. If nothing else, he’s still fun to talk about.

And the cat was pretty pleased with how it all turned out.

The WWE thing is a fairly recent development that made both the husband and I scratch our heads. But I vaguely remember being interested in wrestling for about 20 minutes when I was his age so maybe it’s just a rite of passage for Western PA kids or something. He hasn’t even really watched any WWE on TV, but I felt the need to explain to him that it’s theater more than combat. Yesterday we ended up falling down this weird YouTube rabbit hole when I showed him how cleanly the wrestling matches were choreographed (“See how he’s not actually punching that guy?”) and then in contrast showed him a few clips of Mike Tyson doing various savage things to people who used to have names but are now just One of Those Guys that Got Knocked Out By Mike Tyson. Then I realized that it was kind of messed up to be showing him all of that. So, yeah, I apologize for contributing to the desensitization of the next generation. My bad.

Anyway, I shopped online for some WWE toys for him just a few days before Christmas and was just kind of blindly picking things. I got him this which he was pretty excited about:

But I imagine OSHA wouldn’t have very good things to say about that particular workplace.

My mother-in-law gave him this game:

The other night when my sister-in-law was visiting, we had this conversation:

Her: “Is that game…beer pong?”

Me: “No, it’s…well…yeah, actually, it is beer pong.”

Then later, the husband came home and said, “Isn’t this basically beer pong for kids?” Violence and drinking games…that’s the kind of parenting I provide.

We normally go to my grandparents’ house on Christmas Day but obviously that was out so we all gathered at my mom’s house. We have a tradition where we take a picture of all the guys and then all the girls. The Y chromosome is strongly represented in our family.