ho ho no

This season of the year makes me introspective.
Ghosts of Christmas past.

I don't have a tree up.
I am considering not ever doing a tree or decorating again.

It's not that I don't like it, it's just that my kids don't care anymore. And when I think about the amount of work involved in decorating and the much easier option of ignoring the holiday décor... well...

I suppose if I ever have grandchildren, I'll want to decorate and make things fun, so I'm not getting rid of my stuff just yet. Eventually I'll divide it between my kids.

My holidays since being married have been good although we were broke more often than not for many, many years.
We haven't exchanged gifts for a very long time.

When the kids were small, I started putting things on layaway in January for their birthdays in June. Then right after that, I started with the holiday stuff. By the time it was Christmas, I had a lot of things stockpiled. I didn't want my kids to have lean Christmases.

It seemed like I always had to wait until the last possible second to make those layaway payments, though.

We chose for me to be home with the kids.
It wasn't a good choice for us financially, but I'll never regret it.

I remember once that making that last-minute-15-dollars-or-we-will-put-your-stuff-back-in-stock-and-keep-your-five-buck-deposit payment was going to cause my checking account to overdraw by about eighty cents. I kept very good track of our checking account then... I knew to the penny exactly how much we were going to be short for the month. ;)

::sigh::

So I found something that I could return to a store for six bucks (well $5.99) and took it back. Went and deposited the money in my checking account and went to Kmart and made the payment on time.

I'm glad we were able to get 'stuff' for the kids.
We never had a lot of extra money.
On occasion we went without, but they did not.

I remember one occasion that I made my own girl supplies for three days until payday. It was frustrating, of course, but even then I had a sense of humor about it. Making the choice between tampons and a gallon of milk didn't seem difficult to me... taking care of the kids, ya know?

I don't fault my parents for our own lean holidays, it just happened. But it was very important to me for my kids to have more things than I did because not having those things caused me sadness.

Does that mean I'm shallow and materialistic? All I know is that coming back to school in January and seeing everyone in new clothes (for like two whole damn weeks!!) and listening to them talk about their holidays depressed me and made me feel sad/mad/deprived.

Add in the irrational anger and craziness of my dad during those times.

I didn't really look forward to Christmas.

I have a lot of perspective now, of course. First, consider how young my parents were. When I was born, my mom was 21, Dad was 20.

My baby baby brother was born when my mom was 27, only a year older than I was with my first child!

Even though times were different when they got married and a lot of people their age were married and reproducing, I have tried to imagine having children when I was that young. I'm so glad I didn't. The timing ended up just about perfect, really.

So the Christmas angst happened with parents who were only 33 to 36 years old. For goodness sake, my parents were 39 and 40 when I was married!

My dad had a lot of pressures. He never made a ton of money, and his retirement was very important to him. He had them taking the maximum allowed out of his checks, which really didn't help much with the family budget in case you wanted to know.

My grandfather was buried on my 13th birthday in 1973. Dad's twin brother died in 1975. I know Dad's never been the same.

Dad was trying to take care of his mother, too. My Grandma Fern.
She was a crabby old lady who thought nothing of smacking him in the head/boxing his ears when he spoke wrongly or did something else to displease her. She was mean to my mom and always, always found fault with everything my parents did. She loved us, but she wasn't stable and calm. How could my dad be stable and calm with a mom like that? And my mom was a doormat. She didn't stand up for him or to him.

Dad wasn't making a lot of money. I don't think my parents considered that Christmas comes every year. They certainly never planned accordingly.

They spent a large amount of time worrying over it. I think I would have worried less if I hadn't heard all of that, really.

It's all a long time ago.
And I know I wrote about their worry over gifts recently.
They still do it.

And Christmas still causes me to stress and obsess, although not over gifts and giving.

It's all shit that's in the past.
I wish I could just turn that off, but I'm terrible at letting things go.
I regret it, but can't seem to control it.

So this year we will have a peaceful dinner with our kids and appreciate being together. I will give my kids some cash because they're grown ups and they know how hard it is to earn.

Eric and I won't exchange gifts.

Next year I'll be out of sorts and introspective again, of course. Because apparently that's the childhood tradition I brought with me.

Bah Humbug.