Christmas is over. My kid and I have made a decision regarding all future Christmases. We will no longer attend any of my family's Christmas dinners. Since I was married and had a child, my mother has refused to consider the idea of me having my own family dinner, and has only attended Christmas dinner at my home one time. That's 17 years of family dinners - not at my home...

Now that my mother is too old and oogy to prepare Christmas dinner, we have it at my bombastic brother's filthy apartment. I cook. There aren't enough pans, or dishes. We get on each other's nerves and he tends to act out all his childhood issues with his mother on Christmas day. Loudly and with a great deal of passion...

I've been putting up with this for the past ten or so years, because for the past ten or so years, my mother has been dying. It's always "This could be mom's last Christmas". You know what? Mom has had ten good Christmases. If she croaks over, she will have those memories. If I croak over, all I'll have is a bunch of pain in the ass Christmas memories.

Nope. Not gonna do it. Never again.

The kid and I have started planning next year already. We're thinking we'll either go out of town for the holiday, or we'll stay in town and perhaps have people over for Christmas Eve and lay about in our jammies all Christmas day - or we could stay in town, and help out Christmas morning at a homeless shelter, and then come home and put out jammies back on... At any rate, we have time to finalize things. 364 days in fact!

Other than the family dinner, Christmas was very nice. Now I'm busy seriously relaxing. I'm reading two books and making my New Year's Resolutions. I've purchased two new gel pens, a pad of lined paper, and a combination dictionary/thesaurus, because I've decided to actually start writing. Really writing. No, really...
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The kid and I went to the thea-tah this afternoon for a matinee performance of "Les Miserables" I think I'm the only person who hasn't already seen it a zillion times. I cried all the way through the damn thing! Are you supposed to do that?

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