It's beginning to look ...

I spent a lot of money this week, on cabs and flowers and eating out and drugstore stuff and presents. Since November I have been trying to save extra money for Florida - I need to get my sisters presents and want to do something nice for Josh while we're there if I can figure out what there is to do, maybe take him out to a nice lunch or something.

Tomorrow we are going ice-skating in the frigid cold and then after that I am not spending any extra money at all until Florida.

My aunt doesn't celebrate Christmas, except for eating some of the Christmas foods and watching Miracle on 34th. So on the first Christmas Eve living with her, my sisters and I went for a walk to look at all the lights, and for the first Christmas morning when we lived with her, I made Mickey Mouse pancakes and plopped the plate on the table, merry Christmasing my sisters. We laughed at seeing them plop from the drop and that was pretty much it. We got Lisa Frank stationery and hand-me-down clothes from fire families, and just dealt. And it was okay. I mean, it sucked - don't get me wrong. It totally sucked. But not because of the stuff, because we missed our people.

Maybe it was just because my mom and nana weren't too into doing tons of stuff for Christmas. We had lights to put around the front door, and the front windows, a wreath for the front door. We didn't do a Christmas tree because my mother felt like a real one was cruel and we didn't have the space to store a fake one. They cooked a lot, and my nana played old-lady Christmas music, and there were always a lot of random people around at Christmas for dinner slipping me candy or quarters or sips of their wine when nobody was looking. We did one present for each of us, from each of us.

On one hand I am sad for people who are too poor to celebrate Christmas with trees, decorations, presents, fancy hams and everything else they want. On the other hand though, it bothers me a lot to think of people who actually go into debt for Christmas and get so wound up in giving presents and candy and all that.  People go places like the Container Store to buy tons of ... well, containers to store all their decorations that are only used for a month or two each year. That people go nuts trying to create their Christmas dream instead of just telling their family, "You know, we're going to skip it this year."

Of course each of my sisters are getting Christmas presents from me, but I refuse to go nuts. Even if I were a billionaire I don't think there'd be a tree that reached to the ceiling with expensive ornaments and hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of gifts. Though I might be tempted to do some fancy food stuff.

We have a white tabletop tree from Borders, and a string of blue lights. We tied silver string around those chocolate coins for Hanukkah and tied them like ornaments to the tree. So not really, but it's the most Jewish-friendly Christmas tree it could possibly be. I like that the tree fits in a corner of the top shelf of a closet (next to the electric menorah) that would otherwise be empty, and we can eat the chocolates each year.

I made snow(wo*)men, winter, snowflake and Hanukkah and Christmas sugar cookies and eggnog ice cream today. Josh looked over my shoulder when I was putting the cookies on the tray to go into the oven, and he separated the Hanukkah ones from the Christmas ones, saying it felt sacrilegious. I did the cookies by hand with a knife though, so they don't look that great. After separating out the winter ones that came out best, I put those aside to give Laurie and John.

*Alex was offended by the idea of snowmen, so we gave ours bows on their heads and called them snowwomen.