Christmas Musing

Every year I hang up the old advent calendar. I don't have the traditional kind of advent calendar. I have one that is made of cloth and a little snowflake is moved to count down the days, as opposed to the traditional ones where little cardboard doors are opened every day starting with December 1st. I fully intend on moving the snowflake and I do everyday for about a week. Then, it just kinda slips my mind. Screwing up the advent calendar is a yearly tradition with me since moving out on my own. When I was living with my parents, my sister and I would fight every year about how the advent calendar worked. She insisted that it was a count up rather than a count down, so every day of December that she would move the marker (at my parents' house we had a reindeer marker) up a day to match the date in December, I would be sure to go behind her to change the marker to indicate the number of days until Christmas. This would lead to a daily argument about where the marker should be.
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The holiday break always leaves us feeling a little worn out. Just yesterday my wife showed exactly how worn out she was. We were singing Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer to our little one and she was chiming in with the non-traditional between line responses (Sample: "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer had a very shiny nose- like a lightbulb"). We get to the line "All of the other reindeer used to laugh and call him names," and she goes for the "like Monopoly" response rather than the "like Pinocchio" response that belongs there. We looked at each other and started laughing.
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