Merry Christmas!

Ah, the holidays!

It's about 12:30am on Christmas morning.  Sara got to sleep at about midnight, after tossing & turning and coughing and vomiting and bathing and tossing & turning some more.  She has a lovely rash and sounds, well -- horrible.

My Christmas cards?  They arrived via FedEx today.  So be on the lookout for your post-holiday Merry Christmas from the Gunns real soon.  (I've never ordered cards from Snapfish before and likely won't again -- these were supposed to be picked up in the store.  Grrrr.)

Santa is hard at work assembling his toys for the big unveiling in just a few hours...  He sure does use a lot of packing material.  Must be a bumpy ride all the way from the North Pole.

But before you leave here thinking I'm nothing but a Grinch, I have to say that in many ways this has been an especially lovely Christmas.  I wish Sara wasn't sick for so many reasons, but among them is that I don't want her first "real" Christmas to be spoiled by an unforgiving bug.  It has been so much fun watching her experience all of what will become our family traditions for the first time:  learning about Santa, singing carols every night together in bed, taking drives to look at all of the pretty lights, making cookies for the big guy -- she has loved it all.  She believes, and if you want to know the truth I believe a little bit, too.

I miss my parents but they are still here, living in many of our rituals.  There's an apple in every stocking and Santa still doesn't wrap his presents.  We'll have our grandmother's coffee cake in the morning and, hopefully, still make a trip down to Columbus to see Grammy.  And in the midst of all of this is the joy of seeing that little face anticipate, imagine, and wonder.  It's really the most fun I've had in a lot of Christmases and is probably the best gift I'll get this year.  I think now I understand why my parents never cared so much about the presents they received but still counted this time as the best of the year.  

They were right.