Get me (ka-ching!) – I’m giving out wings!

In the “Because I do not have enough to do” category:
Primo fell out of my bed this morning, where he had crawled during the night due to a nightmare, and knocked over a bedside table and a lamp, breaking the table and bending the lamp stem.

And in the “Let me bitch to you because who else can put up with it” category: Hubster, who felt the need to go to the gym, even though *I* haven’t gotten to exercise in God knows how long and God, does it show! forgot his sneakers (Christmas Eve he forgot his swimsuit) and came home to pick them up and GO BACK downtown to go to the gym. He’s been gone for almost three hours, all told. (P.S. But now he came home and is cooking me eggs and bacon – so all is forgiven.)

**************
Christmas Eve dinner went swimmingly (Haha! Get it? Swimmingly? Never mind.) and to my delight, just about everything was edible. I did try to get away with eating seven peel-n-eat shrimp and counting them as the seven requisite fishes, but that didn’t go over so well. So I ate the fried cod (cold but still good), the shrimp, the crabcakes (lemony and tender, if prepackaged), a smelt or two, and the woefully-overbaked (45 minutes!!) salmon. I won’t touch the baccala and potatoes or the linguine with clam sauce for love or money. I think next year I will institute the Christmas Eve Cocktail. The Red Devil has clam juice in it and that should count. Especially if tuna salad does! Which I did not eat. I can eat tuna salad of my own devising any day of the week, thank you very much. The limp penne and meatballs I skipped altogether. I suggested throwing some anchovies in the green salad/antipasti next year, for yet another fish, but that met with cries of derision from the culinary troglodytic masses.

We were regaled with music. My 8-year-old niece sang, in appropriately dirge-like tones, a song all about the coldness, hopelessness, and despair of life, that she had learned at her Catholic school for the Christmas concert. By the third verse, I was all ready to cut my wrists with the cheese knife. Good thing she’s so cute anyway.


We manfully plodded through the new tradition (my mother-in-law conjures up one a year, I swear to you) of singing “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” inspired and coached by these glasses which I think she got at Kaufman’s After-Christmas sale last December 26. Primo may have been the only one who1)knew all the words without the glasses, and 2)actually enjoyed this event.


The present-opening mayhem did not even begin until 8:30 p.m., which is generally the time my two older boys are in bed, lights out. Which meant I had two fairly strung-out boys on my hands. I wish we could get together in the afternoon for gifts, let us all go to our respective masses, and then reconvene for dinner, but suggesting that was met with a reaction, of course, completely out of proportion to its heresy.

At any rate, everyone was very excited and pleased with their gifts. And in the “Aren’t I an ingrate” category: Why does my mother-in-law find it necessary to hand me envelopes containing large sums of cash for the boys from all her card-playing cronies whom I could not pick out in a line-up, when I am nursing the baby, consoling wailing Segundo for one reason, and scolding sobbing Primo for another, all while ripping wrapping paper off their gifts for them? Apparently the Hubster is incapable of receiving these gifts? She makes me nuts. Can you tell? (And I don’t just mean those yummy sugar-and-spice pecans.)


Oh, and wait – the grandchildren photo. Seconds after this was taken, all the younger ones started melting down. Merry effing Christmas to you all, too. Doesn’t Segundo look like an angry, drunk elf?

Finally – FINALLY - we all got home, brushed teeth, set out cookies and carrots, checked the NORAD website one last time (Santa was in St. Andrew’s, Canada) and went to bed. Or at least the boys did.

Hubster and I collapsed in front of the TV to relax with a local Christmas music special featuring an enormous blind man in janitor’s coveralls tunelessly singing along with an all-female madrigal group, a three-hundred-year-old rocker, and a chubby Mariah Carey wannabe. At about ten thirty, Primo said loudly from his bed, “Mom! Dad! Go to BED or Santa will never come!” And then Segundo half woke up, crying for more of Grandma’s meatballs. No, I did not make that up.


Here’s the calm and peaceful post-Santa, pre-children scene.

Complete with Segundo’s favorite Christmas ornament. From now on, whenever I doubt myself as a parent, I am going to look at this and say to myself, “Yes, but how many mothers allow their children to hang clothes hangers on the Christmas tree?”

Around 3:30 a.m., Primo climbed into bed with me, wide awake and chatting. He finally shut up and went to sleep. And then next morning – around six? Count 'em, there're three. Then at 8:30 a.m.? Here’s Primo. We sent his brother in jump on him shortly after I took this picture.


Everyone loved their gifts. Even Mimi. I tried to talk Santa into buying her some clothes but I know Segundo won’t let her wear them anyway. Although he did give her a new tattoo for Christmas with his new gel pens.


I scored a waffle iron (years of hints) and even better, H. made me waffles.


The mountains of rustling crumpled wrapping paper freaked the cats right on out.

The best part? I got a two-hour nap Christmas afternoon, read about a hundred pages of a really engrossing if creepy Catherine Wheels, by Leif Peterson, and savored a Green and Black’s mint bar.

*************

Christmas night – over the Hubster’s aunt’s teeny tiny little house where I drank too much, ate almost an entire plate of ladylocks, spit out (into my napkin, people!) a mouthful of the MOST DISGUSTING cake I have EVER tasted (prompting my mother-in-law to make H. taste it, whereupon he had the same reaction and she proclaimed in disgust that she didn’t know what was wrong with us), and managed to get stuck talking to a boring cousin’s even more boring clandestine homosexual lover about kung fu.

************

Christmas 2005 – and a good time was had by all.