onetiredmama: A Very Different Christmas This Year

From our provider:

Rate This Article

0 Comments

I could never imagine how families managed the holidays with relatives flung across the country

or step-families with so much time-sharing to do.But I got a taste of it this year, my first non-traditional Christmas. We had a flight out of Buffalo to Tampa, Florida at 2:30 Christmas Eve to visit Pat's mother. When would we celebrate our own Christmas? Or Christmas with my parents, let alone my grandparents?

Usually this isn't an issue for me. When you work in TV news, you often work Christmas. We work during holidays and hurricanes. During States of Emergency, when they tell workers to stay home, we need to get in. If it was Armageddon, I'd be expected to go in to work. One Christmas, I anchored the 5.6 and 11pm shows on Christmas Eve night, slept on the couch in the ladies room, and anchored the morning show the next day, Christmas morning. These days, we usually don't have a morning show on Christmas, but I've never been able to take the week off around the holiday.

Except for this year. Apparently, Mars aligned with Jupiter while the sun was moving through Aquarius or something like that, and I was able to take the week off after Christmas. So for the first time in our 15 year relationship, we'd be able to spend time with Pat's family for the holidays. (He's been an awfully good sport all these years.) So we had to come up with some new ideas for our holidays this year. We wrote a letter to Santa explaining our arrangements and suggested he deliver the big presents to our New York home on Christmas Eve morning, and that he could bring some of the smaller gifts to Florida on Christmas Day. We were going to celebrate with my family the Friday before we left, but we were all too busy and far behind with wrapping, packing, baking etc. that we decided to get together New Year's Day after we returned home. I didn't even start packing until 7pm the night before we were leaving! As usual, I needed another week to get things done before the big day arrived.

But the kids were delighted Christmas Eve morning with their many goodies. Santa's Elves stayed up very late to assemble some of the biggies so the kids could play with them before we whisked them off to the airport. I was in a near panic as I tried to complete the project I was doing for my Grandmother to give as her Christmas gift to the family. The History of our Family was still printing out as we left for the airport, and god bless my mother for assembling it for me after we left. (Note to self: gift cards next year.)

The kids were thrilled to take their first plane ride and Jack actually let out a "woo-hoo!" as we took off. He also tried hard to understand why life vests were a possibility. "We use these when we land in the water?" "Um, yeah. Don't worry honey." They were both angels on the way down (stay tuned for the part where that all changed on the way home.) There were no bumps, no meltdowns or delays.

Preparing for the first flight

We arrived in warm Florida at 8pm and hustled the kids into bed for round two of Christmas the next morning. It was another avalanche of presents, and luckily Jack got a new suitcase from Santa to lug them all home. It was my first Christmas without snow and it was very strange to see palm trees with twinkle lights, and giant snowmen inflated on lush lawns.

Smile for the birdy