Lonely Christmas

Happy Christmas everyone!!
After a few years of noisy raucous Christmases,this one will be a much calmer one-it is going to be just the four of us.We had relatives coming,but the weather messed it up for them.They will be arriving tomorrow.So for today,it is life as usual for us.
My older kid is all broken up about it,so much so that his moping got to be a little too much and I had to explain to him how he was dragging us all down with him and spoiling it for all of us too.He seemed to recover,but I am keeping my fingers crossed, there are quite a few more hours left in the day!!
Since we are not entertaining guests,we plan to stick to our Primal diet-so it is going to be ham and a salad and a no-carb mousse.
As much as I was angry with Emmy for his whining,I feel pretty weird too.Any festival day takes you back to all those days back home when you were a kid,all the noise and commotion of the women cooking,the men talking politics,the savory aromas wafting out the kitchen,the cake and all the sweets tempting you from platters,the new clothes you don't want to change out of,all the visitors bearing more edibles,the cousins you get to run around with......the day seems never ending but by evening,it is unbearably sad-you have to wait one more year to experience that euphoria again.It seems repetitive,but the best times of one's life seems to be childhood-sheer joy with no responsibility.
For the first time this year,I got slightly caught up in the gift giving tradition and instead of buying gift cards,made the mistake of buying actual gifts-wrong thing to do.The gift wrapping made me crazy and I could almost empathize with all the people who have to buy,wrap and sometimes mail gifts, all in the few days before Xmas!!Never doing that again!!I have not created the gifts-under-the-tree tradition in our house,but then,it creeps in because of a couple of good friends,and you are compelled to return the favor and before you know it-you are that frazzled lady wheeling packages into the post office!!New Year resolution-Don't fall for that!!
1.03 p.m:Done with lunch-the salad,ham and a potato salad for the kids.I also made some Baba Ghanoush,and the  crowning glory-Avial-which of course,I ate and no one else did!Noe ate the ham and not much else-but I am not complaining!!
I opened today's Oregonian,and guess what?People have already moved on!!The ads are for Xmas clearance items and grocery stores have champagne on sale.That's it?We're done?No!No!!Where is the postprandial stupor?It seems like we are hardly done with Christmas,than we're off to the next great event-New Year.We are flitting from one thing to the next and do we savor each of those?Are attention spans getting to be shorter each day or are we overwhelmed with too much that we don't stop to smell the roses?
I absolutely love having people over for Xmas-the  more the  merrier-but I noticed that when we have a big crowd,as the hostess,you are compelled to whirl around doing twenty things at once and making sure everything is done on time,everyone is well fed and there is enough food to go around and the kids don't burn the house down.....and when everything is done-you are too tired to remember much about the day.There is this sense of accomplishment but it is tempered with tired,achy muscles and this sudden impulse to be horizontal on a comfy surface for the next few days!
So today,for me,was slow-but the kind where you savor every minute!And get to vegetate on the couch updating your blog without having to worry about the dishwasher being loaded properly!!But I don't want too many of those days either -so once in maybe three years?That should do!!