Christmas at Home

Dhyana, Lila and Lila's friend, Mike, decorating cookies in Christmas Eve Day.

I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I love to be home for Christmas. I also love to be in St. Louis with my extended family for Christmas. These two scenarios can't happen at the same time. Although, this year, they came close. I got to be in St. Louis a few weeks before Christmas. So it was close enough to feel holiday-ish...close enough to see a few Christmas trees up, close enough to sing a few carols, close enough to eat some festive St. Louis food. Like toasted raviolis. And Steak'n'Shake.

And then...ahhhh...I also got to be home. We put up our tree for the first time in two years. Lila said the tree seemed awfully small. I think rather she's grown about 5 or 6 inches in the last two years. We picked out our favorite ornaments to hang. Some very old glass ones from my childhood and wooden ones my brother and sisters and I painted; some made by my grandmother and both my daughters; Don's comic book characters (Taz on a motorcycle, Scooby and Shaggy, Batman, and the Grinch)and Dhyana's favorite...a little elf who's job is changing the burnt out light bulbs. I'm not sure which one is Lila's favorite. She opted out of hanging all her Power Puff Girls ornaments. Who knows?

Don asked me what I wanted for Christmas and all I wanted was for us all to be home. So Dhyana has been here for a week and is home with us until tomorrow. We bought her boyfriend a plane ticket so he could spend a few days with us as well. They drive back to Lawrence tomorrow, stopping in Hutchinson to spend a little time together with his family.

So I like having all the children here. I like them all stretched out on the couch, I like cooking and eating dinners together. I like watching them eat. That activity satisfies some primeval need I have as a mother. I even like cleaning up the ongoing and mountainous piles of dishes.

As with every other part of my life, this joy is only one side of the coin. The other side is mortality. This time is bought into view by my mom being hospitalized the day after Christmas with a sigmoid tumor. This is lower part of your colon. She has a colostomy right now to let the inflammation go down on the tumor. At some point in the near future, she'll have an operation to remove the tumor. It seems to be a common thing and not to be cancerous. However, my mom will be 79 in February and surgery is scary at any age.

Life goes on, at any rate.