December is Not Christmas Time Anymore

Here we are in December, a month that I very much enjoyed as a child.   Being an only child, I did actually get a lot of gifts on Christmas and during the family part on Christmas Eve.  I loved the decorations, making up the tree, and most of all Gram's house.   I don't think it's faulty or sentimental on my part to think those Christmas's and other holidays at Gram's house were filled with a little magic.   Okay, maybe that is a little exaggeration there LOL.   Those were the holidays that I loved, and they were gone many years before Gram finally succumbed to old age and all of it's problems.

I did go on celebrating Christmas with my little family.   On the first of one of my dog's deaths, Neptune, on December 21st that magic started dwindling away.   Since then this month (not year) has seen the loss of my Mother In Law, Mustache our cat, Jazz our first dog, and finally Jackie last year.   These are by far the worst of estrangements.   My grandfather passed away a couple of days after being too sick to spend Thanksgiving with us.  I missed my last Christmas with my Granmother, because monster did not want her to come and then complain about going back to the assisted care facility.   I should have just gone and spent Christmas with grandmother!!  In my current frame of mind, the thought that I just could have done that did not even occur to me.

So while in general I enjoy holidays more because I don't have the past obligations to the estranged, I do not think the month of December will ever hold the joy for me that it once did.   I am okay with that, it's nice to remember my fallen friends and family who have been estranged through the event of death.   That is more important than a holiday made to commercialize everything:)

However, though these are joyful memories, they do make me a little blue, as my time with those friends and family members have passed.   December is filled with so many days of passed family and friends.   So it is important to get out and enjoy life in honor of those that have passed.  

A lot of my pick me up comes from my husband and my dogs.   We have been watching the first season of Columbo on Netflix, and also whipping each other's ass in Playstation 3 fighting game.   I have continued to cook with my husband.   We have been having a lot of fun doing this.   I used to hate cooking as I had no instruction pre my marriage in the correct way of doing things, and so my meals turned out like crap.   I need A LOT of instruction just to get through the little things that go wrong, or what the consistency should look like, or what's the difference between this mixing and that mixing.   With instruction, go figure, we have had some excellent meals that we made together.

Yesterday, I started clearing out some skating paths in our wetlands out back, which have frozen over.  Good work out, and kept the dogs out there for about four hours while I worked on it.   I think we all got good and frozen, and then took a nice long cuddly nap together.   No doubt some good exercise came from it too, as I am clearing the brush ET and that blocks the paths in the wetlands.  It snowed yesterday, so now I have that to look forward to clearing.   I don't know if the rink will be done today, but it should be done by Christmas if I work diligently on it.

My In Law family is Jewish.   Traditionally, they have not done the big family thing around Hanukkah.   Although my family alternates it between my cousin's house and the sperm donor's house, I have wished more to see other family during times when I won't be around the sperm donor and the monster.   Also it seems that side of the family thinks if we see each other, we will run straight into each other's arms.  Now spermy might put on a good show for the family, but I have seen him outside the family and did not feel an out pouring of love and good wishes from him.  I also saw him a long time ago at a family event, where the monster spent her time coming up to any family member that I was trying to talk to and getting in between us to try to prevent it (she is an utter peach that way).   I just don't need that kind of drama and selfishness around me.   Not even because it's the holiday, it's because life is too short for me to have to deal with that.  

If family does not make other times available to see me when we are not even a mile away from each other, then clearly they have no interest in me.   As such, they are hardly family in any sense of the word besides biology.  That does not mean I hold hard feelings towards them, I don't.   But why would I be putting myself out there in an uncomfortable situation with people that I barely saw once a year previously?  To me, that is not family.

There is one to three relatives that tried to have any sort of forward/future relationship with me in any active way:)