Holiday Happenings

I am a mom.  I love being a mom.  The problem is, I also have serious guilt.  My mother knows the hour at which my brother and I were born, our weights and lengths, the weather conditions in the days leading up to each birth,  both our blood types and our social security numbers.  She even kept all of our baby teeth.  Ok, that last one is a little weird.  I still wonder to this day why she did that.  Was she going to make jewelry? Perform voodoo?  I have no idea.

I, on the other hand, struggle to remember the children's names when I AM LOOKING DIRECTLY AT THEM.  Also, I have to refer back to the baby books I created to find out how much each child weighed at birth, which means that Ella is screwed because I haven't started her baby book yet.  She is nine.  By the time I finish her baby book we will probably have established some new sort of system of weights and measures and it will be irrelevant anyway.  Their blood types?  I have no freaking idea.  I can't even find Ella's birth certificate.  I'm pretty sure she's mine.

It's November.  Halloween has passed and, according to the displays at Wal-Mart, we have skipped over Thanksgiving and are now smack in the middle of  "The Holiday Season".  I may as well rename it "The Shortcomings Season" because it is during this time of year that all of my shortcomings are on display for all to see, kind of like Miley Cyrus' undergarments anytime she goes out in public.  I am trying to let go of the guilt.  I am trying to embrace my shortcomings.  I no longer beat myself up for not baking Christmas cookies.  I got the nine year-old a cookie press so that she could take care of that tedious task for me.  She's probably a better baker than I am, anyway.  I have totally given up on ever sending another Christmas card again.  Making fudge?  You've got to be kidding me.  It's all I can do to locate suitably itchy clothes for Ella and The Boy on the day of the kid's "Winter Program," thus guaranteeing that they will appear  like two young tweakers who haven't had their fix yet as they sing some inane song about wanting a hippopotamus for Christmas.

And don't get me started on Christmas shopping.  I would love to be one of those moms who makes a list with extremely thoughtful gifts for each child, ranked from highest to lowest priority, and then spends the months before Christmas searching out sales on each gift so that I can spend the last couple of weeks prior relaxing and enjoying some holiday nog in front of the fire.  In reality, I generally look at the calendar, notice it's already the middle of December, and then feverishly hunt down random items on the internet.  Maggie is easy, as she sends me an itemized list complete with pictures via text message.  She's so efficient.

I'm sure that, around December 15, Amazon.com receives a notification from their sales department that reminds them I will be going online soon to purchase presents, so they begin to send me targeted advertisements for whatever obnoxious toy is hot that year.  Unfortunately, The Boy never seems to want any of these items.  "I know, I'll get him Legos!"  I declare, as time ticks away and I gulp down what has at that point become medicinal nog.  Despite the fact that The Boy has enough Lego pieces to build a life-size space shuttle, in my desperation I am reduced to buying them anyway, because I'm sure as hell not buying him the other thing that he wants, which is an iPhone.  He only wants the phone so he can record irritating videos and post them on YouTube, and I just can't bring myself to subject the world to several hundred videos of him playing Minecraft on the Xbox.

I have yet to find the perfect present for Ella.  Every year she chooses something, puts it on her comically misspelled letter to Santa, and then promptly changes her mind about thirty seconds after I have purchased whatever gift she asked for.  Last year, for instance, she declared she wanted an American Girl doll, which as every parent of a girl knows, is an extremely expensive doll who's clothes cost significantly more than actual adult clothes.  I took out a third mortgage, ordered the doll and then drank some medicinal nog as she informed me that she decided she would rather have a Lego set like her brother.  In the end, when she opened up her present on Christmas morning, she was pretty happy.  Of course, when I noticed a couple of days later that she didn't seem to be playing with her doll at all, and in fact had removed it from her room entirely, I asked her why she didn't like her doll anymore.  It turns out that her brother had convinced her that her doll could come alive like "Chucky" and was going to kill her in her sleep.  Merry Christmas, Ella!

Despite all of my shortcomings, I am still looking forward to the holidays this year.  And, I think I have figured out the whole gift thing, too.  This year I will get all of the children necklaces with their birth weight and blood type engraved on them.  I wonder if I can find them on Amazon.