Our Stressful Christmas

We talked in our Sunday School class this week about what, if anything, we would change about Christmas next year compared to this year. Good graceous, what all would I change?

Well first off, I would hope that next year my mother in law is NOT in the hospital up until 2 days before Christmas, with no clear knowledge until that very day that she wouldn't in fact spend Christmas on the neuro ward recovering from a somewhat botched brain surgery that left her leaking spinal fluid for weeks before anyone caught it. I mean, seriously, if you just did brain surgery on someone and they suddenly developed a runny nose, wouldn't you at least test to make sure it's actually snot and not spinal fluid before you sent them home? Apparently not my MIL's doctor! *sigh* Praise God, though, that she seems to be doing much better now. We are still praying for all the feeling in her face and her hearing on the right side to be restored.

The next thing I would change is the decorations at my house. I would like to actually HAVE some next year. A few weeks before Christmas this year we found out that Zollie had high lead levels. We had someone from the Health Dept come by and test around our house and all the miniblinds and windows lit up. Apparently vinyl miniblinds are terrible for lead. They use it to stabilize the vinyl and after a few years they start to break down and lead leaches out into the dust. Then your kids pull the blinds back to look outside and get the dust on their hands, and then put them in their mouth and BOOM, lead absorbtion. So the week before Christmas, while the boys and I were at my moms, PG was home replacing blinds and painting windows to keep the cracking paint under control. I guess this is what we get for buying a house that's nearly 100 years old. So, due to all the work PG was doing coupled with the fact that Christmas light wiring is coated in lead paint, all we put up this year was a wreath on the front door. *sigh* All of our extra Christmas money went into that project, so gifts were sparse this year, though no one seemed to mind. Which leads me to my next change...

I wish everyone else in our family would give sparser gifts next year. We seriously had 2 carloads of stuff to bring home between my folks and PG's folks. WHY does Christmas need to be about how much money we can spend at Walmart and Toys R Us??? I'm really starting to hate Christmas...doesn't that sound aweful? But I am! We hear all season from our pastors and Christian radio stations about how the secular world is trying to take the Christ out of Christmas. We are told to write our legislators to tell them that we DO want to be able to put manger scenes on public property and we are told to boldly say Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays. But then we turn around and buy right into the secular, humanist mentality that Christmas is all about the pressents. It really makes me want to vomit. My kids didn't need all that stuff. We had just weeded through and gotten rid of a ton of toys and they didn't miss them at all. I don't want to sound like I'm ungrateful. I'm not. I TRUELY appreciate the fact that our family wants to help us out and give us things. I LOVE the new pantry shelves my mom gave me. PG and I LOVE the new TV from his parents. And Ian loves all the stuff he got, too. But I just hate the commercialism of Christmas. I hate that I stress every year about whether we've gotten enough for so-and-so or whether we spent the same on both parents. That's not what Christmas is about! Or, at least that's not what it SHOULD be about. My mom buys stuff all year for us for Christmas, and then she still feels guilty about not getting us enough stuff. We don't need ANY stuff! I'm happy just to get to spend the time with her and watch her with my boys. The boys would be happy just to play with her and their grandpa without any gifts at all.

I also worry about what this is setting up in their minds as far as expectations. I do NOT want my kids turning into greedy monsters. In our home, we don't do Santa. Each child gets 3 gifts from mom and dad/siblings. If 3 gifts was good enough for our Lord, 3 gifts can be good enough for my kids. The Santa thing went over like a lead balloon with my grandmother. She couldn't understand why we would NOT do Santa. I can't understand why she would be upset with us for not wanting to lie to our kids. I will have to answer to God one day for the decisions I made when parenting my children, and I don't want to have Him ask me why I thought it was appropriate to celebrate His birthday with a lie. We haven't even told PG's family that we don't do Santa. I dread that about as much as I dreaded her finding out we plan to homeschool. Oh well!

I suppose that's enough whining for one morning. All in all, we had a very nice Christmas. We got to spend time with family, my house looks splendid after all the work PG put into it, and (other than Ian having 2 random pukes Christmas morning from eating too much junk food) no one got terribly sick.

Merry Christmas, everyone! Sing Happy Birthday to Jesus and make sure to tell your kids the REAL Christmas Story.

Praise: That my MIL is doing so much better and got to spend Christmas Day with us. She missed her grandbabies terribly.

Prayer requests: First, please pray for my step dad's uncle Emmit. He has CHF and was hospitalized Christmas Eve. They drew off a lot of fluid and he was doing a bit better, but it's still touch and go. Secondly, please pray for a cousin who is pregnant, unmarried, and getting very little support from her family. Please pray that she has a safe, healthy birth and makes the right decisions. I may write more about this later, as things develop, but for now I want to maintain her privacy so I will just ask for prayer.