Merry Merry Merry

So, I had a couple pre-Christmas posts forming, but they weren't happy. They weren't merry. They weren't seasons greetings fodder. It was a lot of not-going-home-this-year-rain-isn't-Christmas-weather-by-the-way-my-mom's-dead-at-Christmas-AGAIN sort of stuff. I was trying to get into the mood, I really was. We bought and decorated the tree, we sent and received many, many Amazon boxes, and I even made stockings for the three of us.

And I tried and sometimes, for some moments, I was OK. And then, I'd hear or read or see something and be all...meh again. Which didn't seem fair to MOTH or to Tankbaby, or to my fives of loyal readers. So I just kept skimming YouTube for claymation Christmas specials, and humming "Baby, It's Cold Outside" in the grocery store, and making my mom's favorite candy cane cookies (recipe from the Betty Crocker Cooky Book, the family copy of which is spattered with eggs, batter, and seven-year-old scrawl of "DELISHUS" next to the peanut butter cookie recipe).

And, after yesterday morning, I'm glad I kept going. Because I would have hated to have been grumpy and Grinchy on Christmas morning, when I opened this:

(WAIT! Go away. Go find your spouse/partner/significant other/mom/dog and tell them to keep reading for the Best. Present. Idea. Ever. Then be surprised and thank me in a year.)



How effing cool is that? MOTH found this website and did all the proofing and layout work and published one year's worth of this little blog of mine.


Can you believe it? It's 205 pages long, which made me feel slightly better about my pathetic posting rate. I opened it, thinking that the back pages must be blank or something, but it's full. Full of my words, which looked like actual words when printed on real paper. With page numbers and everything. I don't know if I can adequately express how cool this was. We had agreed not to do presents this year, for financial reasons--only stocking presents. My big gift to him was a DVD of an old silly movie from MOTH's childhood. It seemed nice at the time. It seems a little inadequate now.

At least I also got him a chocolate orange.


Hope you and yours had a safe, lovely, and calm holiday.