He Knows If You've Been Bad Or Good.......

I've been dreaming of Christmas for the past couple of days. I know it's way too early to think about but I can't help it. I think I'm associating the holidays with happiness and peace of mind. Heh.. Okay.. and being broke and lots of pressure.. But it's a season I love. Christmas in our house is usually great. We used to have a tradition of the entire family putting up the tree and decorating it. The past couple of years it's only been the two younger kids and myself decorating it. It's okay though because it's a tradition I want them to have fond memories of. In my sappy mind I secretly wish it went something like this: The whole family gathers to assemble the tree and we decorate it while laughing, joking, and listening to Nat King Cole sing Christmas songs. Then we'd all sit and drink hot cocoa and marvel at the beauty we'd created as a family. Okay in all reality this is probably how it will go: Robert will be out somewhere with his girlfriend or buddies. He's way too cool to do such dorky things now. Nick will either be working online or he'll be so consumed in chatting it up with whomever he won't notice us. David and Shari will be into it though and for me that's enough. We'll decorate our tree and David will of course put all the red balls in one spot on the tree where I'll go through later and even them out. We have ornaments in a wide variety of ages. We have them from the 40's, we have them from the 70's and 80's(when I was a kid) and every decade since then. They all have some meaning. Some of my very favorites are just plain simple glass ball ornaments from 1991. That was our very first Christmas as a family. We were so poor then. I think I paid a dollar a box for those ornaments. I've managed to protect and save about a dozen from that time period. Although things weren't great in our marriage by a long shot, times seemed to be so much easier. Even being poor. Life was simple. Sometimes I long for those days again... So anyway.. 99 days and about 13 hours till Christmas! Get ready!