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Just when I was getting used to my new SoCal lifestyle, it finally snowed. My superfabulous new camera captured Charlie's reaction. Whee! Imagine, digital photography with no excrutiatingly long shutter pause! Also, snow! Imagine, snow, in New England, in December!
Now for a little signing update: Charlie has added the signs for pig, horse, cow, cat, and please, which if you saw how cute he is when he signs please, you too would feed him nothing but hot chocolate and marshmallows.
Charlie is napping, Summer went with my mom and John to pick up Joey at the train, Jeff is watching football, the gifts are all wrapped, and I get to take a breath. A quiet little oasis in the middle of a busy, fun, exciting long weekend.
[Insert big, like, hour-long pause.]
Well that didn't last long. Summer, Grandma, Pop, and Joey came back from the train, Summer changed into her Christmas dress, and then Summer and Jeff went to church and Joey commandeered the computer for fantasy football.
As I was saying.
We kicked things off Friday night with a Chanukah party for our friends. We often get together with our old playgroup families on Friday afternoons, and the dads come after work and join us for pizza. This week we made it a Chanukah party. Just like in my Massachusetts family, I am one of two Jewish people in the group. 
Everyone appreciated learning something new and Jeff, who is now almost an honorary Jew, fried dozens of latkes. The house still smelled so good when we woke up that we fried more for breakfast on Saturday.
Saturday night was our annual preposterous cookie decorating ritual. Here are last year's results. This year, I think, I finally triumphed. Behold my masterpiece: fat guy in a Speedo with a toupee, a unibrow, and chest hair. Jeff's brother Greg, the undisputed king of cookie decorating, tied Jeff's Eat @ Joe's camel for second place with this handy wrench set. I've also included my mom's very first entry ever, a fancy opera lady, as well as a lovely princess decorated by Summer--I smoothed on the frosting for her and she applied the sprinkles.
Tonight of course is Christmas Eve, and the "turch" service Summer and Jeff are attending is a children's mass. Summer was not looking forward to it and asked if she will be allowed to eat or go to the bathroom. It's turch, Summer, not Gitmo.
Tomorrow the kids will come down to find all the wonderful presents from Santa and Grandma and Pop and all the books and underwear from Mom and Dad. The big exciting gift from us was supposed to be the IKEA easel, all set up with a red bow. There was, apparently, a miscommunication, and my mom thought when I asked her to pick it up at IKEA, since she lives so close to IKEA, that it was supposed to be a gift from her. So she wrapped it up flat in the box.
In my ongoing quest to force myself to not try to be perfect--really, the only way I achieved my cookie triumph was to give up on even trying to be devastatingly clever--I am using all my willpower to not rip the smiling red snowman paper off the easel and set it up. It's done, it'll be fine, I've got to let go.
It's going to be a great Christmas.
So here's the thing, the Christmas/Chanukah "dilemma"? Really not a problem. Not for me, anyway--I grew up with both. No issues there. I celebrate Chanukah as a small religious observance--light candles, sing blessings--and Christmas as a pigs-in-blankets and Lipton-onion-soup-dip-with-Ruffles-fueled orgy of materialism. Santa, yes; Jesus, no. I know this is not what the good Christian people of the world have in mind, including my friend Maureen, who takes great pains to call Santa Claus "Saint Nicholas" in an attempt to keep the Christ in Christmas for her children. I am a little bit sorry. If it helps, we totally went to Christmas mass every year before the priest scandal. Or maybe it was before we had kids and lost the ability to sit silent and immobile on a hard wooden bench for a whole hour. Can't remember.
No, no, the REAL December dilemma is the presents. For the past three weeks I have thought of nothing but presents. First I decided I would not give the kids Chanukah presents. Chanukah would be a low-key, sweet little family moment. I set about shopping for Christmas presents online. I made lists in my reporter's notebooks: Summer on one side, Charlie on the other. Summer's list was longer, but Charlie's presents were more exciting. Was this fair? Around this time, Jeff stopped talking to me.
On December 15 I became totally paralyzed because the dolly car seat I ordered through Amazon for our niece arrived and it was the wrong dolly car seat (I do not recommend ordering anything from Amazon that is fulfilled by Galt Toy + Galt Baby. Let me rephrase that. DON'T ORDER ANYTHING FROM AMAZON THAT IS FULFULLED BY GALT TOY + GALT BABY.) Since Galt Toy + Galt Baby was not returning my emails or phone calls, and Christmas was just 10 days away, I would have to order the dolly car seat from somewhere else (I have learned the hard way that the place you want for toys is eToys.com) and fight with Galt Toy + Galt Baby about the return later. Because I have no credit card, this meant that my debit card, which is currently staying in the rehab room next door to Lindsay Lohan because it is "exhausted," would have to submit itself for another 50 bucks and I would have exactly NEGATIVE FIVE GAZILLION DOLLARS in my bank account. Paralyzed. I did it anyway. I needed the dolly car seat. The RIGHT dolly car seat.
Sorry for all the shouting. As you can see I'm having some trouble with the Christmas presents. Can you tell I am way overthinking this? Take Charlie's gifts, for example. Back when I was worried that Summer had more than Charlie, I ordered up Dusty the Talking Vacuum. I then spent approximately four days fretting that if I give Charlie Dusty, I will crush his imagination permanently, because he has so much fun with the Swiffer Carpet Flick, and our cute wooden toy broom from Dan and Whit's [At this point I feel I must let you know that there is something wrong with TypePad tonight and it won't let me highlight more than word at a time, which makes linking difficult], and why would I wreck that with a plastic talking toy? I remembered a few years ago when Summer had this pink plastic calculator that looked like a flip phone and she used to pretend to talk into it, and then we lost it and got a talking Ariel flip phone, and then she just stuck to the Ariel script:
Phone: Hi, I'm Ariel, what's your name?
Summer: Summer.
Phone: You're my first human friend! What do you like to do in the summer? (That's a coincidence--it's just what the phone says)
Summer: Go to beach, go to fair.
Over and over again. So I made myself sick about Dusty and his "15 fun phrases," and then went over the list six more times--I made the same list six times in a row on six different pages of the notebook. All the while I was feeling weird about the whole thing. There's this voice in my head, maybe it's George Clooney, telling me to forget the Christmas presents and Save Darfur. Y'know?
Then packages began arriving from other places. Jeff's childhood-best-friend's mom. My ex-boyfriend's wife. My step-father's sister in Sweden. Presents for the children. SO THOUGHTFUL! SO APPRECIATED! But not really helping with the Darfur thing, or the thing about the kids growing up thinking the month of December means presents every day. In the store, Summer points out something she likes, and I say, "Honey, I can't buy you anything right now, I just can't, because you're getting hundreds of presents for Chanukah and Christmas, we can't just buy stuff for no reason." 
Then at Summer's friend Sylvia's gingerbread house party she tells the other little girls, "I'm getting hundreds of Chanukah and Christmas presents!"
For some reason this reminded me of when my dad told me that I could really have a successful marriage with anybody, and what he meant was I should marry someone Jewish even if he wasn't the best kisser in the world, but what I took it to mean was I could marry that Catholic guy Jeff because, hey, we can work it out.
So I decided that these surprise presents would be the Chanukah presents, because it was either that or they just open them when they get them anyway, or save them for Christmas, which means everything will just blur into a haze of metallic snowman wrapping paper, coconut macarroon fudgies, and bourbon. Which actually doesn't sound so bad.
On Saturday, since the weather gods have decided this year's Christmas theme is Tropical New England, I slid on my flip-flops and popped the kids into the wagon and pulled them down the street to the realtor's office to donate a gift to Toys for Tots. Our realtor friend Peggy gave the kids candy canes and pins that said "I Donated to Toys for Tots," and Charlie played with a fire engine and Summer colored while Peggy and I chatted about our families and our holiday plans. Heaps of toys spilled all over the office floor, and Peggy said they'd already had six truckloads taken away for the charity. "People are amazingly generous," she said. "But you're so good to bring your kids--most of the time it's just adults."
There. There it is. One teeny, tiny bit of something. One ten dollar toy, one hour in which my kids--well, my big kid, was thinking about someone besides herself. Every journey starts with one small step.
Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, and Happy New Year everybody. I hope Santa brings you that stainless steel toaster you've been dreaming of. No wait, that's me. Anyway, cheers!
L.L. Bean Boat and Tote bags are strong enough to haul children around in. Wait a minute, what am I saying? Uncle Greg and Aunt Alissa are the strong ones. Here they are at our Chanukah party (Uncle Greg is hauling both of my children):
I am fortunate to have married into a Catholic family that is very supportive of my Jewish traditions. On Rosh Hashanah, I cooked dinner for 28 people, 26 of whom were not Jewish. Everyone loved it. On Saturday we had a Chanukah party and Maya, the other Jewish person in the family, fried delicious potato latkes. I knew I was lucky but did not realize just how lucky until a friend told me her husband didn't want her to bring her menorah to his family's Christmas gathering in another state. They'd be there on the last night of Chanukah, but he said it would be a hassle. I'm sure that extra pound of luggage would make a huge difference. Lame.
And while I'm on the topic, how cool is my mom? She raised us Jewish, even though she is not Jewish, because my dad wanted it that way, but of course she had to do all the work. I don't know if I could do what she did. Merry Christmas, Mom! See you in a few days!
P.S. I checked, and L.L. Bean bags can hold up to 400 pounds, or ten Summers, or 14.8 Charlies.
