My mom puts out her Christmas stuff on Thanksgiving night, and it comes down Christmas night.
We put up the tree when we get around to it, and leave in up through Twelfth Night through sheer laziness.
I work nights & sleep days so the week after Thanksgiving, I help Mom get the decorations out of the storage shed & she decorates while I sleep. Usually the (artificial) tree is up two weeks before Christmas. She usually starts taking things down about mid-January & gets it done by the end.
Risked life, limb, and property to get VWife to the surgeon on time; it took an hour to do a 30 minute trip in normal weather.
Nurse just told us the quack is doing an emergency case across the parking lot at the horsepistol (she’s in the ambulatory surgery center, FWIW), and she’ll be delayed a couple of hours. :mad:
I’m not a big Christmas guy. I’m kind of a Charlie Brown where that comes from, I’d be perfectly content with a small tree, a little wreath somewhere and the immediate family hanging around.
So for me, it’s over just in time.
In other news, this ankle business has me scanning OnDirect for stuff Ms Bus Wife would never watch.
It’s Always Sunny… Pretty funny stuff.
I’m trying to remember exactly but its like Feb 1 or 2 --------- whichever is Candlemas. I was raised in a mostly Eastern Orthodox family so we stretched it out for all we could. 
These days I/we don’t celebrate as much and we don’t do outside decorations. Christmas to New Years seem to be marked as much by funerals as they are gifts. We don’t get morose and sad about it - we still manage a damn Merry Christmas. But we don’t do the outside decorations and really planned out things; just ride the wave.
(One Dec 13th ages ago was my wife’s 35th birthday. Her brother committed suicide that day. The date part was accidental; he was manic depressive and had lost all track of time. We had decorated to the nines and after traveling back and forth to Harrisburg several times to clean out his house and handle the estate stuff, we had to deal with ours. I guess in some ways we didn’t quite recover totally from it all. )
A kazoo! Of course! That’s what the six-year-old is getting next year! 
Luck was with me this year and I got everyone awesome presents. My sisters picked out potholder patterns that I’ll make for them this year, the four older kids got money to go to the movies, the baby got a toy tow truck that he rolled all over the floor. My BILs both got a growler of beer. (Endless Summer–made with organic water!) My dad’s present is going to have to wait until the weather clears–I’m getting my seven boxes of books out of his attic.
My oldest nephew gave me his copy of Lego Indiana Jones for the Wii. “I’ve already beat it,” he muttered as only a disaffected twelve-year-old can. He has no idea how awesome he is for that. The giving, not the muttering.
Now I need to call work and see if they really need me to come in today.
BOO-YA! I don’t have to go to irk tonight!
dances
Still waiting for that quack to show up…
snow stopped about 5 hours ago, but because I’m on a cul-de-sac, I don’t expect the plows until after sundown.
Sis and my folks have been gone for years, and Bro live 250 miles away - we haven’t had a family holiday of any kind since the '90s
Fingers crossed the doctor shows up very soon, Bob.
Sleepy. And I just had to fix thirty-five typos in the above sentenc.
For our romantic eighth anniversary, we’re… going to Costco and out shopping for some new shirts for me. And a humidifier. It’s so exciting! Okay, we are actually going out for dinner to a real restaurant in the evening. My parents are taking Gnat for twenty-four hours because they’re saints, and Attacks Husband and QD volunteered to babysit Tom Kitten for a couple of hours.
There’s a major highway in Hippy Hollow that hasn’t seen a snowplow all month. Kind of sucks because the snowiest part is right in front of two grocery stores. Yet the secondary road I live off of has been plowed twice so far. I’m guessing it’s because a Major Historic Inn and a Starbucks are on this road. Because, you know, those are the *important *places that people *need *to get to. :smack:
This made me laugh. Thank you, I needed that. Since we’re not having kids, we’re just going to give my sister-in-law’s kids (if she has any) the drum set without any worry about revenge. Actually, I think I’ll add a kazoo to the list of things to give her future kid(s). That’s great. 
When I was a kid, we’d put the tree up in early to mid-December and take it down after Jan 6. Now we have an artificial tree so we can put it up earlier, usually Thanksgiving weekend and take it down around New Year’s. I go to church for Christmas Eve service, which I really like. And I started a tradition when I moved out on my own (so 10 years now) of making lasagna for Xmas Eve. It was good this year. We’re on the second year of what may be a tradition of having a few folks from my church who don’t have family in the area over for Xmas Eve dinner and then go to the service together. I hope that tradition continues.
This year we may have started some new traditions. We didn’t go anywhere and didn’t have any family in town. So we had breakfast (French toast made with homemade challah) with one friend - my knitting friend and KT’s flying friend… we both really like her since she shares interests with both of us. And then lunch with a group of “strays” - other people who also don’t have family in the area. One of them in my work friend and the rest are her friends, whom we’ve met before but don’t know all that well. But it was still fun. Someone made brisket, and, inspired by that, KT made corn bread and collards. Someone else made kale with peanut sauce so we had plenty of greens. And my work friend brought an awesome (if store bought) cranberry cheesecake. And the house where we ate, where one of the people was cat sitting so the owner of the house wasn’t even at our impromptu little party, had a hot tub that we went in after dinner. Not a bad way to spend Xmas.
I’m with everyone else, though, on being a bit down around this time. There are fun moments with friends over food, but the rest of the time, I feel blue. I think we need to start a new tradition that has nothing to do with the actual religious holiday or our families’ past traditions. Something fun, and MMP-ish. But given our diverse locations, taste in food, taste in entertainment, etc., I don’t have any good ideas. But if anyone can come up with something fun as an MMP beat-the-winter-blues tradition, let’s hear it!
Howdy Y’all! Home from irk! It was as busy as we thought it would be. Got a stack of stuff to get through tomorrow and Wednesday with more to be added to it I’m sure. Plus I get to go to large and in charge Dawson, Jawja to help some of our folks at the senior center there get their drug plans all squared away for the new year. Yee and Haw.
Spaz you’d put food ahead of over priced coffee and history? Sheesh! 
Here’s hopin’ VWife has seen the doc by now BBBobbio.
Sails sounds like a fun NYE.
I bought collard greens today. Tonight I clean ‘em. Thus, Papa John’s will make dindin. OYKW is bringin’ it. Tomorrow will be real food. I took a pork tenderloin out of da freezer this mornin’. I’ll do sump’n with it for dindin. Maybe grilled with some vegetative matter on the side. I await inspiration.
Ok, off to check email and stuff.
Later Y’all!
KT made an awesome grilled poke tenderloin for dinner last night. He made a rub with LOTS of ground cumin (like a couple tablespoons), a little chili powder, garlic and onion powder, and maybe some other spices, but those were the dominant flavors. Mostly cumin. It was soooooooooooo good. The leftovers are going to become fajitas.
I can’t clearly recall when we would put our tree up for Christmas, but I know we didn’t take it down until after Three Kings (?) in January.
We also celebrated St. Nicholas Day on December 6th or 7th. We had red St. Nick boots we’d put out, and then they were filled with candy and fruit.
Growing up, Christmas was always celebrated Christmas Eve, but we had a light dinner.
Christmas Day, I guess in a nod to my Dad, we had the big meal; usually Christmas goose.
Once my parents divorced, we were usually invited to family friends places for Christmas Day, but we still had our own little celebration on Christmas Eve.
As an adult, I usually put the tree up in December, but when depends on the time I have to go out and get it. We haven’t put lights up outside in the last couple of years because our ladder sucks, is too short, and is wobbly. In years past, we could borrow our neighbor’s whammy jammy fancy-schmancy ladder, but he and his wife divorced and he got the ladder.
I was planning on going in to work today, but I still feel pretty crappy and in fact, feel like I’m getting worse. This sucks. I really, really have to go in tomorrow, but I’ll still be the only person in my branch, so if I’m contagious, I won’t be passing it around.
I’m making stock right now from our prime rib roast bones. It smells really, really, good (when my nose clears enough to allow me a whiff). Later, I’ll skim the fat, pull the meat off, and make soup with egg noodles, barley, carrots, celery, onions, and maybe some peas.
This is the part of our Christmas meal my family enjoys the most. While the prime rib roast and everything that goes with it always receives rave reviews, the soup is our family favorite. Maybe because it’s comforting and it signals the end of the frenzied season for us.
VWife has been under the knife since roughly 3:30. If it’s taking this long, then he must be making progress, and won’t need to put in an artificial shoulder.
here’s hoping
Good wishes coming to VWife…
Good thoughts headed out to VWife.
You’re all making me feel much better. I’m glad to know that I’m not the only one who has a tough time with the season. No offense to Baby Jesus, but I HATE Christmastime.
I’m just glad that it will be a new year soon and I’m grateful for TVMan and my friends who help me to make it through this time each year.