Today hasn't been too bad. Course, it's only 9:21 a.m.
Got briefly excited when I got a thingy in my email about VA Disability pensions being allowed to be received concurrent with retirement pay. Turns out you have to have over 20 years of service. Alas and Alack!! My poor DH was injured in the line of duty after ony 1 ½ years.
Such is the way of my life. Go ahead, dangle that withered carrot in front of me!!
Still, I am grateful for the pension we DO get as we would be totally devastated without it.
I am making Christmas gifts for all the older kids, mostly because what money I could scrape up and that Nursey and Cop loaned us, had to be spent on the littles. That sucks, but then you'll have that. It goes part and parcel with what we are doing. Besides, I think I have a major problem with the fact that Christmas costs so freakin much.
I have been watching commercials lately. It comforts me in a small way to have the stupid TV on in the kitchen whilst I sit in the dining room or move about the house pretending to do things that are necessary and valuable.
I pretend to do them cause I don't' WANT to do them. LOL. Little things, like um..cleaning the Thanksgiving mess off the stove, (still not done but starting to bother me), cleaning the bathrooms (3 days overdue), finishing projects (not even within the realm of reality this week...) you know.
Why is it that the more time a person has, the less they get done? Perversity of nature I guess.
Anyway, the commercials. There is one where a fairly comfortable woman goes out and buys her big sister a diamond eternity necklace to say thank you for being there for me.
Yeah. Well, we are not in that category. Sorry.
The kids commercials are REALLY pissing me off. To the point of making me all depressed unless I grab myself up. Which I have to do every day at least three times.
I am thinking that we are having a good Christmas this year. Each kidlet has like 10 presents under the tree. Which is more than sufficient. So why am I obsessing over the lack? Why, as a society to we hanker after what we do NOT have, instead of appreciating what we do have? Is this something that is genetically wired into us? I could probably get a stupid federal grant to research this. Sad, isn't it.
½ Pint got one of the things she asked for particularly. The Girl Crush Streak and Style. $24.99 for four tubes of non toxic color for little hairs, four plastic clips that you could by at Wally World for $.99, and some sort of applicator pen looking thingy called a color wand. It is on every prehuman little girl's list this year. ¾ Pint got one from us as well. Pint, did not. She may or may not have asked for it. I honestly don't remember. DH is giving me shit cause I did not take a list of what they asked for to the store. I just sort of wandered through, looking at prices and putting things in the buggy.
Well, yeah.
I even got into the mistake of saying..and I absolutely HATE this...
You'd better watch out, Santa is watching.
What a crock of shit that is?
So last night we talked at dinner. About Christmas being about love. About celebrating a day which represents, but is not historically accurate, the birth of Christ. I did explain that if you do the calculations, that the closest we can come is that Jesus was born in mid March. LOL. Which makes no sense. Oh, the academic in me realizes that the Church adopted a few pagan rituals to allow Christianity to be more palatable to the masses who were used to celebrating at certain times of year. I know historically that the Winter Solstice was already celebrated and that the time of year was borrowed from that.
In truth, Easter probably comes closer to the actual birth of our Lord than does Christmas. However, this doesn't really bother me all that much, nor make me less of a Christian.
I explained that the giving of gifts is a tangible statement of something that should be shown every single day. That love is about giving and sacrifice. Then we talked about what each of us give to the other.
Still, on Christmas morning, knowing the society we live in, I hope they are happy.
I am totally not liking holidays anymore. How sad is that. First Thanksgiving, now Christmas. And me with two littles to raise yet.
I'b better get ahold of myself there. I got a ways to go.
