The Mom Crowd

Amanda gave some good tips on guarding your joy this season.  My number one joy stealer during the Christmas season is family overload.  Like many people, I have “one of those families.”  If they made a movie about my beloved family, I don’t think it’d do very well because viewers would say it wasn’t believable enough and no one would be able to keep up with who’s who and what’s what!  Oh, the drama!  I love each and every member of my family very much, but I can only handle a few of them in small doses. The irony, though, is that my favorite thing about the holiday season is seeing my family and spending time playing board games and cards and eating some good food!  However, it doesn’t take long before the family drama and the family history makes these gatherings difficult for me.

This year, I am consciously determined to enjoy the time I spend with my family.  I am ashamed that I sometimes don’t look forward to spending time with my extended family and I am going to try very hard to be aware of my bad attitude and be excited to spend time with them.  I think I have longed for “what could be” in my family relationships, instead of making “what is” better and enhanced.  When you are constantly longing for something else in your family it makes their shortcomings obvious and it more difficult to appreciate the wonderful attributes of each of your family members.  I forget that I have a lot of power in how well my relationships are with my family.  Instead of hoping they will change or strengthen their relationship with me,  I am going to take the lead and strengthen the relationships I have with my family members as much as I can.  I challenge you to make the same committment this year!

Do you have a hard time enjoying your family during your visits?  How do you avoid family overload?  How do you deal with the family members that you just do not “click” with?

One of the best things about the Christmas season is watching classic Christmas movies.  My husband’s favorite is National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.  My favorites are It’s A Wonderful Life and A Christmas Story.  I just realized that they all have a long-suffering wife/mother figure.  Something about the stress of the holidays, huh?  Poor Ellen Griswold is always running around, simultaneously trying to support Clark while cleaning up his messes.  Mary Bailey has four little ones to look after, and a husband who’s miserable.  (Remember the scene where he yells at the kids’ teacher on the phone?)  And Ralphie’s mom is a classic representation of motherhood: always making dinner, trying to keep the Old Man happy, and lovingly raising two boys.  She’s my favorite.

What movie does your family watch every Christmas?   

Here’s one of my favorite scenes from A Christmas Story, re-cut for some added laughs.

 I have been thinking about holiday traditions the past few days.  Mostly, I have been feeling anxious about whether or not my family has any.  My kids are now to an age where traditions seem to be part of their development because they understand more about what is going on around them and they want to participate. When I mentioned it to my husband this evening, he was perplexed as to why I felt like we don’t have any. We put up a tree, do an advent calendar, read the Christmas story from the Bible on Christmas morning, open presents….. It was then I was able to clarify that I feel like we are missing something UNIQUE to our little family unit.  What is something that we do over the holidays that incorporates fun and sentiment all in one scoop?

 This year I thought we’d make some roll out sugar cookies together and that maybe THAT could be our special thing. Except when it came down to it, I felt more like Monica Gellar from Friends wanting to shout at the children, “Wait!  You don’t know the system!” And part of me wanted the cookies to look pretty and professional.  The kids had fun dumping out piles of sprinkles over the freshly iced cookies and licking their fingers every few seconds. So much for pretty symmetrically decorated cookies.  At dinner when we were debriefing the whole experience my oldest shared, “Mommy didn’t let us touch anything.”  That isn’t true–I did let them use the cookie cutters but I had to tell them to wait several times–my rationalization is that it was my first time making rolled sugar cookies and I was figuring it out for myself first before I let them help me very much.  All I could see was warped cookies not being picked up carefully and so much sprinkles around me I thought I was at the beach.  In the moment I was thinking that maybe this isn’t what one of our traditions should be.  I have to learn to have more fun and not care if the whole house gets trashed with cookie sprinkles while the baby swipes freshly cut out cookie dough from the cookie sheets. 

 One thing we have done and are planning on doing again is to gather some other friends and go Christmas caroling in our neighborhood. We did that 2 years ago and it really made an impression on our oldest son.  He has asked if we are going this year again.  We are having people meet us at our house after an early dinner and then we will go out for an hour to sing to the neighbors.  We’ll come back to our house for some hot chocolate and desserts to warm up again. 

 Maybe we don’t need any more traditions than what we do have.  Maybe I’m putting too much stock in the need to be unique. Maybe my kids will remember making cookies and going Christmas caroling with fondness and feel all kinds of nostalgia when they think back on their childhood.  I hope so.

 But, I am wondering, what do you do for your special Christmas or holiday traditions? When did you start doing them? Were your traditions passed on from when you were a kid?

Are you taking a Christmas road trip this year? Check out the web tool CostToDrive.com if you need to budget how much it will cost to make that road trip this year. All you have to do is enter your destination and the year, make, and model of your car and then it will calculate about how much would spend on gas getting there. My husband recently shared this gem of a website with me. He had read about it over J.D. Roth’s Getting Rich Slowly blog where he does a more in depth review of the site in his post.

CostToDrive.com is pretty cool if you love to budget and plan for trips like I do!

I read two great articles last week called 10 Things You Should Never Buy New and 10 Things You Should Never Buy Used.  Ironically, I had been thinking that week of all of my favorite hand-me-downs or favorite things that we have bought “new-to-us.”  Some people just are not and will never be hand-me-down lovers.  I am the complete opposite.  I check Craigslist and Ebay very regularly.  There are a lot of items in my house that were either handed down to us or we bought used.  One of my most favorite places to shop is a resale shop called Kid-to-Kid.  While I love hand-me-downs and buying used, there are some things that just are a no-go.  For example, I don’t buy my own clothes used and sometimes, simply for convenience sake, I will spend a little more to buy brand new.  I also ALWAYS buy new when buying gifts for others.

The items that you should never buy new according to MSN include books, DVDs and CDs, children’s toys, jewelry, sporting equipment, timeshares, cars, computer software and video games,  office furniture, and hand tools.  Items you should never buy used according to MSN include laptops, carseats, plasma televisions, DVD players, vacuum cleaners, camcorders, shoes, mattresses, wet suits, and helmets.

I generally agree with these articles.  Carseats, helmets, and other safety gear should always be new! However, electronics are risky when you buy used, but depending on how good of a deal you can find the risk may outweigh the cost.

So, what about you?  Are you a hand-me-down gal or do you prefer to have everything brand new?  What do you think of these lists?  What are your favorite used finds?  What things will you never, under any circumstances, buy used?