The title sounds ominous, doesn’t it?

As I said previously (my last post?), Paul and I opened our gifts on Saturday.  I wasn’t expecting it, but Paul’s parents came over to watch us open everything and I was completely caught off guard!

Pretty much all I’ve wanted all year, besides crafty stuff, is a Nintendo ds lite and Super Princess Peach.  I don’t even LIKE the color pink for the most part, but when I saw they’d come out with a pink ds I hadda have it!  Alas, my dreams were dashed when I was told that it just wasn’t in the budget.  So, I wasn’t expecting to open all this:

Not only did the booger get me my shiny, beautiful ds lite, but he also got me the Super Princess Peach game, Resident Evil Deadly Silence (which I absolutely LOVE, RE is so much fun!), a Strawberry Shortcake game (the instruction manual is strawberry scented lol!) and March of the Penguins.  He also bought me the Princess Peach tin that came with a case (hot pink, no less), pink headphones, 3 different stylus’ and a vinyl Princess Peach skin.  What a haul!  Having not expected ANY of this it was a huge surprise!

I got Paul the Spiderman trilogy since he LOVES Spiderman.  I know they’re going to be making more, but we didn’t own any of them and now seemed to be as good of a time as any to pick them up.  I also got him the super special, loaded dvd of Transformers because he’s still a 10 year old at heart and goes ga-ga over anything to do with them.  I think he liked the Transformers hat even more than getting the movie!  I also picked him up the cd/dvd of Good Times, Bad Times by Godsmack.  He was at the concert where they filmed the dvd and I about had a heart attack from laughing when I saw him with his arms thrown up in the air and silently saying “Holy fuck” as the camera went right over him!  His big gift was a new mp3 player.  His old one was MY old one and it only held about 30 songs or so.  He’s intimidated by my 30 gig, so I got him a 2 gig with a little screen.  It has all the bells and whistles, but an easy interface so he’s been listening to it pretty much non-stop all this time.

After his parents went home I finished cooking dinner and we just spent the rest of the day vegetating, watching movies, playing with our new toys and then eating way too much turkey/mashed potatoes/cranberry sauce.  It was awesome 😀

For some reason I couldn’t sleep on Christmas Eve.  We went to bed around 2:30 in the morning and I layed in bed until 4 am.  I finally said screw it and got up because I hate just laying around.  I have to keep my hands busy or my mind goes a billion miles a minute.  I decided that since all my Christmas crafting was finished I would finally find a project to work on for myself that didn’t have a deadline.  I started a fair isle snowflake hat for myself since everybody and their mom gets warm handknits from me and I still don’t even have a pair of fingerless gloves to warm my poor wittle hands with!  I put it down after four rounds lol!

I went to bed at 7:30 on Christmas morning and had to get up to get ready to go to my mom and dad’s house at 9 am.  I dragged myself out of bed, downed a 32 oz cup of coffee and we made it over there only 20 minutes late.  We took Transformers over for my Dad to watch (yes, he’s perpetually 10 years old too!) and after we had some pull-apart bread for breakfast we opened our gifts.

Now, I’m going to be really honest here.  I’ve spent most of my life knowing that I was second best to my sister.  I’ve also spent most of my life thinking that my Mom didn’t really care about me because she’s never really shown it.  That’s why it was no big surprise when she handed me a candle and said Merry Christmas.  I wasn’t expecting more and when she handed me a second bag I was a little surprised.  I opened it up and there was a letter on top.  I won’t go in to it here because it was pretty personal, but below the letter was her Madame Alexander doll.

My mom was born in 1943.  Her parents bought her this doll when she was 13 and it was the last childhood toy she recieved.  She’s kept it all these years and every so often she would take it out and tell me about it.  I helped my Mom re-joint her when I was 14 because she was so old that the elastic bands holding her together disintegrated.  I never in a million years would have expected this gift from her, because frankly I didn’t think she felt I was worthy of it.  It’s the only gift I’ve recieved in my entire life that made me cry and the letter that she put with it means as much to me as the doll.  I really can’t even explain the emotions that I had when it hit me that maybe my Mom loves me more than I give her credit for and maybe she’s just not very good at showing it most of the time.

I’d say it was an amazing Christmas after all, and I’m glad that the nasty bah humbugs that were plaguing me a few days before were completely wiped out.  The coolest thing was that it wasn’t all about the gifts, there were some good emotional things going on as well.  This Christmas is the first one of my adult life where I haven’t felt disappointed in some way.  I know that sounds selfish, but I don’t mean it that way.  I’m just glad that I got a little inside look at how my Mom thinks.  You’d think after almost 30 years that I’d have gotten it by now, but it’s just not that clear cut with my Mom and I.

I hope everyone out there had a great Christmas too.  I’ll be looking forward to hearing about it in your blogs, hint, hint!