A Post-Christmas Sigh of Relief

I love Christmas, and I loved it this year.  We had a great time.  What a magical time of year, especially with my children. 

But seriously, what a stressful season this has been for me!  I can't even put my finger on why, other than it was just full full full of projects.  I feel like I have been going nonstop since before Thanksgiving, just trying to put Christmas together for my little family.  The crazy thing is that I felt so on the ball this year.  I had a plan, and I thought I was almost done with Christmas shopping by Black Friday.  All I had left to do was wrap things up and ship them off. 

Wow, I was so far off.  I guess I was done planning things by Black Friday, but not actually done with anything at all until a week before Christmas.  I worked on projects while my kids were sleeping all month long.  I shopped, wrapped, packed, planned, ran errands, cleaned, cooked, then did it all some more.  I reorganized my recipe collection as part of a gift for my sister, which was an awesome project, just lots of work.

I had issues with shipping, as always.  The first one was that I ordered Christmas cards from Costco.  It took them a week to arrive, and when I went to pick them up, I found out that they had been shipped to the wrong location.  So I waited another week for correct delivery, only to find out that the picture I used on the card was so bad that I couldn't send them out!  I had taken a quick picture of my boys in front of my house, and their faces were super red, Hobbes was out of focus, and it was just all around bad.  I had good intentions, but sorry to those who would have received a card from us.  I'll plan it for next year.

One package was accidentally shipped to our former house in St. Louis, and then the people who lived there carried it around in their car for a week and half before finally sending it to me!  Gah!  I was so mad!  But alas, all was well in the end.  All packages got to their people on time.

I hosted a book club and decided to make a cake for it.  No pictures of that one because it was disaster from beginning to end.  Lots more stress than it should have been.  Next time I will make cookies.

I am the ward music director, and I was in charge of the Sacrament meeting Christmas program.  It seemed simple, and in the end it was a very nice program, but it was a lot of work for me, organizing and attending rehearsals all month

And after all of that was done, I hosted two Christmas parties at my house, one on Christmas Eve, and another on Christmas Day.  Both were lovely, but it's always a stress to get my house ship-shape for a get-together with four agents of Chaos living under this roof. 

So, anyway, I'm grateful that it was all lovely, but I'm grateful that it's over for this year.  It feels awesome to get back to normal.  Normal chaos is good.