The Day After Christmas

Okay, Christmas is over, passing in a blur of laughter, food, friends and family, wrapping paper, and cranky, over-stimulated children. It was totally glorious, but I’m so tired I can hardly move. I’m so worn out I’m even thinking that next year I might BREAK SOME TRADITIONS!

Gasp! What horror! How could you? We’ve always done it this way! Yeah, well, my reply is I’m doing it out of self-preservation. Here’s the schedule; see what you think of it.

On Christmas Eve morning we go to my sister-in-law’s house for breakfast. It’s such a lovely gesture on her part. We don’t have to bring a thing. We just go and enjoy eating and being with the family. But we can’t stay as long as we’d like because we have to have to meet our best friends at lunch time to exchange gifts. We can’t visit as long as we’d like with them because we have to get home to cook for the Christmas Eve dinner.

We’d like to take a little nap, but we can’t because if we deviate from our schedule even one little bit we’ll be up half the night catching up.

We have dinner on Christmas Eve with my husband’s family, but we can’t stay as long as we’d like because we have to hurry home to cook for tomorrow morning.

On Christmas morning we have to get up by six o’clock because we have my family coming for breakfast. All we have to do this morning is make coffee and tea, bake a casserole, and warm up the things we cooked last night. The breakfast isn’t fancy, but we do have plenty of it. We’d like to have some more coffee after we get the presents opened, but we can’t because we have to get the house straightened out for dinner. We also have to bake and carve the turkey.

By three everyone is arriving. We eat too much, open some more presents and just generally have a good time. This is the one gathering during the past two days where we don’t have to hurry. After everyone leaves we have to take out the garbage, wash the dishes, scour the kitchen, sweep up the grass and dirt tracked in, and finally we’re finished.

And I haven’t even mentioned washing the Christmas china, pulling out linens, and advance baking I did before Christmas Eve rolled around.

As I said, it’s glorious, but I’m wondering if maybe next year I can cut a few corners. I have to use the Christmas china. I love it so, there’s no compromise there. Now about the food… Who says that I have to bake the turkey? I have a friend who does turkeys for people; I’ll get him to do it. And who says that I have to bake all the desserts? I know a lady who owns a bakery. Why not buy some baked goods from her?

And that breakfast. I love it dearly, but why not simplify the menu a bit? I mean, do we really need four different desserts? I wonder if our friends would be willing to do our gift exchange at a different time, a time when nobody has to rush off.

We’ll see. Maybe I'll remember for next year, but maybe not.

Hope all of you had as wonderful a time as I did.