At this point in my life, Christmas is just a time to give stuff, get stuff, get stuffed and go to bed. To be honest, it is more work than play, and I have not been able to really enjoy either the spirituality of the day or the excitement of it in a long, long time.
We have Christmas at my mother’s house, where I happen to live. But a lot of the family comes from somewhere else, so we usually start rumaging through our stockings at about the crack of noon.

We have a rule that we don’t just go into the living room and start digging in. We wait…for everyone!! And then we take turns opening presents so everyone can see. And there are a lot of us. Which means we get done just about in time to eat and go home.

Now, adult family members do not exchange gifts with other adult members unless they are a parent or a child. So I don’t give gifts to my sisters or my adult nieces or nephews – I think 16 is the cut-off age, and no one in the family is within 10 years of that age in either direction. I do give gifts to my mom and my grand nieces and grand nephew. And I get gifts from…well…my mom.

Except that my sisters do take pity on me and buy me gifts even though I don’t buy them gifts. This is partly because I get the “blessing” of taking care of my mother in her dotage, and partly because it looked so sad with me only having one or two gifts each year. You may have guessed by now that I have no wife and no spawn, while my sisters are both married, two adult children each, plus each one has two grandchildren.

Now, back to my gifts from mom. I am practicing looking surprised! This is because I bought most of my own gifts and, in fact, paid for one of them. my IPod Classic, which I have been using surreptitiously for two weeks now. This started out because I went to an arts and crafts fair that our local community has every year, amd spent about $150 on stuff – a saw blade with a train on it, a goose egg with a train picture on it, another saw blade with a train etched on it, and wooden peg board with….you guessed it….a train picture on it. This was before I could decide on the IPod. So I called my sister and suggested that mom pay me back for these things and then my sister could say SHE found them at the fair. If you are concerned that this is awful subterfuge, please note that my mother will be absolutely thrilled to give me these things.

Oh, BTW, I do all of my mother’s banking and bookkeeping, so she will never know that she didn’t pay for the IPod and my sisters won’t either unless one of them reads this blog, which I seriously doubt.

Anyway, in general each of my sisters and I plan it so that mom will spend about $200 bucks on each of us, and when you add the annual bottle of cologne that we get in our stockings, I was already up to my limit. Now my sisters didn’t care in my case, even when my IPod put me over $250 above our limit. Goes back to the thing about me having the “privilege” of taking care of my mom as her memory fades. I, however, have a strict moral code, so I went back to where I bought the IPod, which is also where I work, and took it off of mom’s credit card and put it on mine, albeit with one year no interest or payments.

So this is why I know what I am getting for Christmas this year, at least from mom and Santa. Oh, and I bought a couple of IPod accessories that I have been using, which I will dutifully wrap as gifts from Santa and be sooooo surprised. I wrapped the IPod box so I can open it and use it, then slip the IPod back into it and put it back under the tree.

Here is what I really want for Christmas: A job that will allow me to get involved with church again, like when I was young. This would mean a nice Monday thru Friday job, which I have never had in my life! And one where I have all holidays off.