The Annual Christmas Tradition: What Was Your Favorite Present?
Every year on Christmas, I ask the same question, because I love Christmas and want to know the answer:
What’s the best thing you got for Christmas this year?
Mine’s an interesting one. I’m supposed to get a large table saw, but that got delayed at Amazon, so I probably won’t see that until after the New Year. (Though the note my wife wrote me explaining why my Christmas Tree was empty? Epic, totally epic.) My Dad got me Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, which stirred up all sorts of childhood memories. And of course, there’s this new tattoo.
But the best thing I got for Christmas?
Hope.
Christmas Eve was looking pretty messy come that morning, with family-related stress, uprooted changes in scheduling, and snappishness everywhere. I was anticipating a tense showdown of an evening, with sadness and tears and meanness…
…And what I got was a beautiful evening with cherished moments with my godchildren, and relaxation, and an unexpected reconciliation with an ex on the eve, and the perfect end to one of my favorite comedy series ever. Christmas was giving, and happiness, and even some quality snuggling with the wife, and was all the sweeter when I was expecting nothing.
So. What was the best thing you got for Christmas? Tell me! Tell me now.
(Long-term readers who are wondering what happened to the other Christmas tradition, the one with cheesecake photos, can see why that’s been discontinued in an essay over on my kink-blog at FetLife. It’s not an unhappy thing, I assure you.)
As selfish as it sounds, the best thing I got for Christmas was 11 full days in my house alone. I love my family, but a lot of my creative process involves suspending my humanity and following my whims for hours at a time. I need it the way a forest needs an occasional fire. And it makes me appreciate my family all the more when they return. 🙂
I got a lovely spinning wheel! I messed around with it a bit, but I need to get myself set up for some decent practice time!
Ours was a very low-key Christmas, and with my meds blinking in and out, I’m thankful for it. Still, that copy of Dragon Age: Inquisition made me light up. I didn’t even know my brother knew what it was, and now I’ll have something to occupy me on all those late nights when the pain is too bad to let me sleep.
My parents gave me a family tree. They made the book themselves (my father is a typesetter), digitised all the photos we have of our extended family. It’s so cool to be able to put together names and faces and to figure out how everyone is related to each other. Also, man, we had so many unmarried mothers in our family and people who divorced and stuff, right around 1900 or even earlier.