Wrapping up the Year

I have been strangely calm through most of this holiday. I had a small meltdown in mid-November, probably related to my birthday. If I had to blame it on something. Maybe it had more to do with the activity in our household at that time. At any rate, Free sent me an email entitled "Negative Energy Cripples the Human Spirit" or something to that effect. It wasn't the easiest thing for me to read since saw a lot of myself in that essay and realized that I was crippling my own spirit. Anyway, kudos to Free for keeping it mad-real.

Sometimes the things that are hardest to hear are the things we need to hear the most.

So after I got over myself in November I got really into things for the holiday as you can tell some of my last couple of postings. I wouldn't say I went overboard at all, and I'm quite happy with the way the holiday turned out for us. I just tried to simplify and I feel like this method made me succeed at enjoying the season.

Some things that were more low-key this year

• Gift buying-I began slightly earlier than usual, some of it in November, some of it very early in December. I only bought for those closest to me and decided in advance just to give one or two people cash only. I went with a lot of first instinct purchases that were within my budget. I used some coupons.
• Wrapping-As soon as the gifts started coming into the house, I wrapped them all and stored them in the attic. To make this possible I cleared off the dining room table and set it up as a gift wrapping station with the tape, the paper, name tags, etc. It made my life so much easier to do this.
• Cooking-rather than take on the daunting and impossible task of cooking the perfect turkey again, plus cooking a million different side dishes, I focused on 4 really good foods that pleased the gang. For Christmas Eve we had stuffed shells. And bread. And butter. The end. And everyone enjoyed it. And for Christmas we had filet mignon, sea scallops, mashed potates, asparagus, and carrots. Five simple foods that don't need sauces, accoutrements, complicated cooking techniques, just a little bit of attention. The result was delicious.
• (A side note about the filet mignon-we went to BJ's and got a whole 5 1/2 pound tenderloin that I carved at home into about 5 different meals, reserving the best, most uniform steaks for our dinner. So in the end I saved about $5 per pound, which is a lot of money.)
• Cookies-picked a handful of easy recipes and just went to town over the course of a few days. Wouldn't have been possible to enjoy this much time in the kitchen baking if I hadn't taken care of the gifts and everything else the way I did.
• Delegate-I actually shared a little bit of the duties with others this year. I normally don't do it, it's a habit, and I'm trying to reform myself into a person who will actually accept the help and kindness from others. Kinda still makes me feel funny, but...

There you have it. These few changes and improvements helped me enjoy the holiday, Rob, the girls, my family a bit more. Now I'm at the point where I feel like we wrapped the year up really nicely and I feel comfortable with life for a change.

The tree is down and I don't think I took a picture. Hmm, I'll have to see what I have if anything. The tree was nice, same artificial tree we've had for a couple of years now. It's a good enough tree. I actually didn't jam every single ornament on this year, but I think it looked better that way. More tree, less crap.