Monday, November 26, 2007

Is we white trash? I so confused.


Almost every year, we have flown our entire family back east for the holidays (the expense of that flight alone? monetarily and emotionally? another post entirely). I am one of five children, and our family get-togethers with our own little offspring added to the mix is one damn good time. Seriously.
But the flying at Christmas? With small, impatient children and as much extra luggage as you can possibly fudge in there while trying to avoid extra baggage fees, since you just spent so much freaking money shipping what wouldn't fit in your airline baggage allowance. Not to mention what the expense was to order whatever gifts you possibly could online and have it all shipped there instead of here....which then should have been easy enough, right? Except that 'there' could have been his mom's house in PA, or my brother's house in PA - each house 2.5 hrs apart -so then there was the keeping track of and making sure that the correct side of the families' gifts were sent to the correct towns.
And then, after Christmas? OMG. I thought that the: bringing gifts there would=the bringing gifts home (each year I am deluded by this notion). No. So again with the shipping. I am talking multiple hundreds here. In shipping. Toys. Back and forth. One might hope that Santa would take care of this, but I am here to tell you that: NO. HE WILL NOT.
This year we are staying in California for all of the holidays. ALL OF. HERE, at the funky mountain hideaway we call home. So, burglars beware! You shall not steal our extra large warehouse-sized bag of cat food, our ten year old pure-bred siamese and whiny cat, our giant stash of crayons, OR the vodka in the freezer. Not this year. Because this year? We will be here to protect our valuables.
So I am getting just a little bit excited about being able to get our own tree! Here at our house! Not 3,000 miles away! IMAGINE!
And the decorating of that tree! With the ornaments we have collected, and those given to me by my own mom - one each year of my childhood - and so on for my own babes...
And we were talking about this decorating and tree choosing and card making and present buying...and Supergirl said to daddy:
"We don't have to put up our christmas lights...because we have them up all year."



...and i wondered...if that was a little bit too white trash more 'carnival' than i really intended for her....are we overdoing it and selling our kids out to the circus too early?...shouldn't we wait a just a few more years?...


4 comments:

mamadaisy said...

i keep mine up year-round, too. even inside. but then again, i eat cranberry jelly...

Lin said...

We keep ours up all the time because, um, because have you ever tried unhooking a ton of Christmas lights from wisteria tangles?

And travel with children at the holidays? We did it once. London to Washington, DC with a six-month old and I apparently am so easily unhinged that I there and then told my mum it would never happen again. It was a bonus when we lived in the same town as my parents for a few years when my kids were little, as it is now when we can spend it with our daughter's family. We now drive to her house for the day and share the cooking.

So since 1969, it has been our deal. We never traveled again with our kids at Christmas. Too much pressure. But we do have wonderful holidays with them the rest of the year when there is nothing to think about except enjoying one another's company.

Plus, I've always thought children should wake up in their own home on Christmas morning.

I do yammer on sometimes...

Denise said...

White trash? No. Now if you are putting empty beer cans on the tree, then um yes.

Cindy said...

Nah . . . we've got them up too: little white ones strung along the top of our front fence. They're on a timer and go on at night when you need just a wee bit of light in our very dark neighborhood. I see them as an alternative motion-detector flood lights.

Do you have any household appliances in your front yard? Box springs? I've always called that the Appalacian Front Porch Syndrome. I was seriously worried when we parked a stand-up freezer in front of our house by the gas grill, but I figure 1) it actually works, 2) there's a large fence around the front of the house, and 3) like nearly everything else concerning our house, it's "temporary" until we finish work on other parts of our house, so we're ok. I think.