A few highlights of the Christmas preparation season:
- The Girl's Christmas pageant at her preschool. She attends a preschool at a local church, so they're free to use all the religious content they want. They did a Christmas concert with a vaguely nativity-ish stage set. Some of the kids (including TG) were dressed as sheep, complete with too-cute-for-words hoods with vertical ears. TG is frequently misunderstood; she's often quiet in public, but not because she's lazy or tuning out or even shy. She's taking it all in, and waiting for her moment. Apparently, going onstage is her moment. She upstaged the baby Jesus, and sang like it was going out of style. (As far as I'm concerned, she owns "Go Tell It on the Mountain" now.) You go, TG!
- Pizza with Santa. As I've mentioned before, our local Santa is a lovely older man who likes to hold court at a local pizzeria one Saturday each December. We went again this year, with my Mom joining us, and he greeted each of us by name. When asked what he wanted, TB said "I'm sure I'll like whatever you bring. But if you could bring some books, I'd like that." That's my boy! TG was a little more specific, but still charming and polite, and she asked for books, too.
- The downtown tree lighting. Our town has a Norman Rockwell-ish tradition of decorating the tree in front of the town hall with lights, and having a little festival (complete with Santa arriving on a fire truck) culminating in the lighting of the tree. TW and I have gone every year since moving here, including the year before TB was born. This year her parents came with us. It was unspeakably cold, but we had a blast. After the tree lighting, they had carriage rides and ice sculpting on Main Street. We checked out the ice sculpting. TB was fascinated by the chainsaw, which I found slightly unsettling.
- Santa's housecall. The local fire department does a Santa service where you can sign up in advance and bring wrapped and labeled gifts for your kids to the firehouse, and Santa will deliver them, on the fire truck, at an appointed time. We've done that a few times, but this year the weather cooperated and Santa was in a great mood, so he let TB and TG climb on the truck for pictures! When you get a housecall from Santa, a present, and a climb up a fire truck, life is good.
- Getting narc'ed on. I took TB and TG shopping for Mommy a few weekends ago. Sure enough, not a day later: "Mommy, guess what they have at [name of store]!" Sigh.
And thus begins my brief blogging break. I'll be back on January 2.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
