Bah, Humbug!

I used to love Christmas. I would start playing Christmas music right after Halloween, and the tree was always up and decorated by Thanksgiving. In recent years though, I have gone from loving Christmas, to being apathetic, then to downright dreading it. I'm pretty sure it started a few years back. Michael and I spent all of Christmas Eve and Christmas day traveling between a three-county area in an attempt to be everywhere we were supposed to be and see everybody we were supposed to see. I remember that Christmas. We had done such a whirlwind tour of family events, that we never stayed at one place long enough to enjoy ourselves, or even eat a meal. At 6 p.m. that Christmas Day, we were driving around town looking for an open restaurant because we were starving. I think we ended up going home and having cheese and crackers. That year, we vowed we'd never let that happen again. The following year, we enforced our vow, which led to a huge Jerry Springer style redneck throw-down with Michael's family in the driveway of his grandparents house on Christmas Eve. Boy, wasn't that fun. Then last year, we knew we just couldn't put up with anymore Christmas shit, so we went away for Christmas. We rented a cabin in the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee and that was the best Christmas ever. This year though, we're trying to save money for the baby that's on the way, so we opted not to go away. No doubt, this will be cheaper, but it will cost me in sanity. What is up with family being so everloving demanding during the holidays? I mean, seriously, Christmas happens every freaking year! Do we really have to do the same thing year after year after year? I think it stems from some morbid fear that every Christmas might be Granny What's-her-butt's last, so we all get guilted into the same Christmas crap again and again.
Well, so my attitude has been less than festive so far this year. The ghosts of Christmas past, coupled with my constant nausea and morning sickness are making me really look forward to December 26th. Realizing that my attitude is at least partly to blame for this holiday funk, I went home yesterday evening fully intending to get in the damn Christmas spirit. I planned to bake Christmas cookies, listen to Christmas music, and decorate our Christmas tree. You know what they say about where good intentions can lead you, right? I knew I was doomed when I was refilling a canister with sugar, and turns out, I was refilling the coffee canister with sugar, not the sugar canister. Then, I realized we were out of Christmas tins, so Michael had to go to the Dollar Store to get some. Michael has a head cold and it was raining outside, so this was a pretty substantial inconvenience, but he went without complaint. Then we baked the cookies. Christmas butter cookies that we were going to adorn with sprinkles and cut into festive shapes with cookie cutters. A grand idea, don't you think? What we ended up with were little cookie dog biscuit looking things that were still doughy on the inside. So, we tossed them. I was being a trooper, so just decided to ditch the cookies and move on to decorating the tree. And that's when I threw up.
We finished out the evening with a smattering of ornaments on the tree and Michael and I comatose on the couch, him from NyQuill and me from Phenergan. Christmas, it seems, has defeated me after all.