I vent to you here about my Paul Complaints, so it seems only right and fair that I should also praise him here when he deserves it, not that I usually think of doing so when it happens, and not that it makes for very interesting reading anyway. But I have one such situation fresh in my mind, and it is this: he helped me change my cartilage piercings.

I see it has been nearly FOUR YEARS since I last attempted it AND ESSENTIALLY FAILED. I’d been too nervous to try it again. But this week I have been having hives again, and my eyelids reacted to a product and got all rashy and itchy, and my knee was hurting, and anyway something about all these physical woes made me freshly determined to at least TRY to make my cartilage piercings more comfortable to sleep on, by using the flat-backed earrings I ALREADY POSSESSED.

I asked the family at large which of them might feel capable of helping if I got stuck again and needed assistance. And to my surprise, Paul, who was not present for the births of any of his children because he is A Fainter, and who cannot bear to hear stories/reports of anyone’s injuries, and who has to yell for me through closed eyes if he gets any sort of bleeding injury himself, said he thought he could do it. “Really???,” I reallyed. “As long as you don’t keep talking about it,” he replied. “Okay, I will let you know when I’m ready to try it!,” I said. “Why not right now?,” he suggested. AND IT WAS ON.

First: one swift shot of bourbon each, just as in pioneer surgery.

Then: I got out the teensy baggie of flat-backed earrings and chose two of them and put them in a little dish of rubbing alcohol. Paul and I both washed our hands. I splashed a little rubbing alcohol on my first cartilage piercing, braced my resolve, and popped out the lock-back earring. I wiped the area with a little more rubbing alcohol, and then Paul was up to bat.

The tricky thing about flat-backed earrings is that they go in from the BACK of the ear (the front part screws onto the post). And Paul felt confident in his ability to handle this, until he saw the ear and did not see any hole, so there was some jabbing around, and some bending of the top of my ear back and forth, and I was starting to get a little queasy, but in the end he found it. There was a teensy spot of blood from the jabbing, but he persisted womanfully and did not faint or falter.

The next challenge was getting the front of the earring screwed onto the post with his giant muscular man fingers, but he managed that as well and we were halfway done!

At this point I looked in the mirror and did not really like the way the new earring looked. It’s a flat little disc, while the old earring was a gold ball just like the ones I always wear in my second lobe-piercings. I didn’t like that it was less noticeable; I didn’t like that it didn’t match my second lobe-piercing anymore. But we were halfway done and I thought I should at least TRY the new earring type: perhaps the ease of sleeping on it would MORE than make up for the appearance of it, or perhaps in time I would get used to the appearance of it, or perhaps I would like the flat backs but need to choose new fronts. In any case, no sense being HASTY without giving it a CHANCE. This was after all going better than expected.

I splashed some rubbing alcohol on the second cartilage piercing, got a firm grip—and, just as before, it was much harder to remove than the first one, and I wasn’t sure I could do it. I didn’t want to irritate it by dilly-dallying, but I almost broke a nail trying to pry it out; it did at last yield. More rubbing alcohol on the newly-bare cartilage, and then over to Paul.

This one went far more easily than the first one: the first one was pierced at an angle, which makes it more difficult to aim the earring, but the second one is pierced straight through. (I will not let this bother me for the rest of my life, I will not let this bother me for the rest of my life, I will not let this bother me for the rest of my life.) This one was done before I even had the chance to start to feel queasy.

For an hour or so afterward my ears were an outraged hot-pink, but now they have settled down. The new earrings are not bothering them at all so far. I still don’t like the way they look: I can see the post part of the stud sticking some ways out of the front, and then the little disk floating there. But I also remember that when I first got them pierced, I thought the stud looked OVERSIZED AND FAKE-GOLD AND WEIRD, and now I look back on those photos and think it looks perfectly normal, so.

Here is something nice about celebrating Christmas on Christmas Eve: the next day, Christmas still isn’t really over. You know most other people are celebrating it right then, and in fact there is a relief to be past the worst part, which is when all your presents have been opened but you know most other people haven’t even started yet. Most businesses are closed, and Christmas music is playing on the radio all day. It still feels like CHRISTMAS. In contrast, after celebrating on Christmas Day, I woke up this morning feeling kind of flat and sad. I turned on the shower radio, which is set to the station that’s been playing Christmas music since Thanksgiving, and it was playing Take Me Home Tonight.

One of the things I like about the whole month of December up until Christmas is the continual enhancing effects of Special Christmassy things: I can listen to Christmas music on my walk and in the shower, and then I can choose a pair of Christmas earrings, and then I can have my breakfast on a Christmas plate and I can have Christmas tea/coffee in my Christmas mug, and there might be something Christmassy in the mail. When I am tediously making dinner for the millionth time, at least I can turn on the Christmas lights and choose the Christmas plates. Right now it feels like that Special Overlay is gone from everything at once, even though I still did use a Christmas plate/mug, and the Christmas lights will stay up until sometime in January. I could have listened to Christmas music on my walk and in the shower, but it didn’t feel right/appealing anymore.

Some of you asked what the Christmas Eve celebration schedule was like. When there are little kids in the family, stockings are filled during their after-lunch naps. (When kids are older, they go to their rooms and pretend to nap.) So then stockings are opened after naptime—earlyish/mid afternoon. (We didn’t do the Santa story, so there was no issue with that.) At around 5:00 we’d have a light dinner, usually soup, and then we’d go to the Candlelight Christmas Eve service at church. (When I had my own kids, we went on a Christmas Light Drive instead of going to church.) After church (or Christmas Light Drive), we’d come home, change into pajamas, and open presents (with wine/cocktails for the grown-ups and sherbet floats for the kids). Partway through presents, like around 9:00, we’d break for Christmas dinner, which was wurstenbroodjes (sausage rolls) and red and green Jell-o salads; then we’d open the rest of the presents, and then bedtime usually thrillingly late, like 11:00 or midnight. That was when The Worst Part was: knowing our Christmas was over, while most other people still had theirs ahead of them.

But then Christmas Day was fun in its own way: wearing new clothes, reading new books, playing with new toys/games/crafts, eating leftover stocking candy. Leftover wurstenbroodjes for breakfast. And by the time we woke up, sleeping late if we wanted to, we knew that most other people had caught up with us and their presents were unwrapped too.

Well! How was your Christmas this year? When I see a question like that, I sometimes feel as if I have to tell the entire story or else summarize broadly or else nothing—like it would be odd to tell just one or two details. But we’re all probably a little too worn out to tell the entire story, and summarizing has a way of making things sound more generic than they were, so I think you should feel completely free to tell just one detail/anecdote, or pick just a few things. That’s what I’m going to do:

• Elizabeth had said that when she didn’t have to wear a scoliosis brace anymore, she wanted to have matching pajama sets—but she didn’t give me a clear idea of what she meant, and I was nervous I’d choose wrong: she’s 15 and that can be a tricky age for mothers to choose fashion; also, women’s sizes vary so much from brand to brand and I wasn’t sure I’d pick the right size. I got her two plaid sets from Old Navy and they were a huge success: they fit great and I could tell she felt very cute in them.

• Paul’s sister’s package did not arrive in time. Her package to us, which she shipped a week after we shipped ours to her, DID arrive in time, so the whole thing feels very unfair. I tried not to let it feel like a very big deal: some people lost PEOPLE this year, and a late package is very minor compared to that. But I wish it had arrived in time, and I hope her Christmas was good anyway.

• I got Rob this Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America, and I’d dithered about it because it’s very sweary—but every time I looked at the sample pages I laughed, so I bought it. And when he first opened it he thought it was a real field guide, so he said in a normal, mildly-interested voice “Oh! Cool! Field Guide to…” and then got to the word “Dumb” and was completely surprised. Then I told him to read a sample page out loud, and I started laughing in anticipation, and then he tried to read some aloud and was laughing too hard to do it, which made me laugh harder, and anyway it was a fun gift.

Here is the other question I meant to ask sooner: We are trying to build up our supply of Christmas movies/shows, so that we can watch them all December if we want to. We don’t have very many so far. Here’s what we have, of what I can remember off the top of my head, so I will probably add to this list if people mention ones we already have:

• Love Actually. I used to watch it on my own because it was too naked and problematic for the children, but the last two years the kids have watched it with me (Paul absents himself). I realize it’s chock-full of problematic stuff. I fast-forward through the parts I really hate. I make loud remarks over the parts I don’t fast-forward: “THIS IS WILDLY INAPPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR.” (x100) “SERIOUSLY SHE SHOULD NOT BE APOLOGIZING MULTIPLE TIMES WHEN SHE DID LITERALLY NOTHING WRONG AND ONLY THE MEN IN THIS SITUATION BEHAVED BADLY; ALSO THIS IS WHY SOME MEN SHOULD NOT HAVE POLITICAL POWER.” “LOVE DOES NOT MEAN SACRIFICING LITERALLY YOUR ENTIRE LIFE TO BE NOTHING BUT AN ACCESSORY TO ANOTHER PERSON’S LIFE.” “THIS IS TOXIC MASCULINITY BUT WE ARE SUPPOSED TO UNDERSTAND SHE MEANS IT TONGUE-IN-CHEEK, AND IT DOES SEEM TO MAKE HIM FEEL BETTER.” “THIS IS GROSS AND FAT-PHOBIC.” (x100) I do a fair amount of loud talking. But I love that movie, I just do. (You really don’t need to tell me if you don’t: I see so much of that every year, and it is disheartening to keep hearing people say how much they hate something you love, even if you get why they hate it.)

• Bing Crosby’s White Christmas. This is the first year we’ve watched it, and it’s just the sort of thing I was looking for (not to the exclusion of other things I might be looking for). Some dancing! Some singing! Some plot! Good costumes! A little silly! A little sentimental! Might have been nice if everyone hadn’t been white, but I guess it’s literally in the title so we can’t say we weren’t warned!

• The Muppet Christmas Carol.

• How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

• A Charlie Brown Christmas.

• Scrooged.

• Elf. This is the first year we’ve watched it. I’d thought there would be a lot more gross-out and stress-based humor than there was. We liked it and have added it to the annual batch.

• A Christmas Story.

• Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square. I will never be able to watch it again (SO CRINGEY AND EARNEST, like a play written by a Christian-school-attending eighth grader—and I say that as someone who, as a Christian-school-attending eighth grader, wrote plays and stories far better than anything I could write now), but it was good for watching once, and Dolly Parton is an angel and also plays one in the movie.

I don’t like movies where the plot is basically a stress dream. This is why I have not tried that Chevy Chase Christmas movie, or Home Alone, or Jingle All the Way.

I think people who grew up with It’s a Wonderful Life can love it, but it is too late for me.

I know a lot of people love the stop-motion Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but we have tried it and it does not click.

I wish I liked Hallmark Christmas movies, because I can see how much happiness they bring, and there is such a good supply of them. But I watched two in a row once as part of a job (the elderly woman I was visiting wanted us to watch them together), and if my sample size of two was accurate, they’re absolutely out.

If you tell me to watch that movie with Tim the Tool Man Taylor turning into Santa, I might consider it, but from the outside it looks like one extended fat joke.

Okay I LOVED Bad Moms Christmas even though I cringed so many times and it was TRULY TERRIBLE IN MANY MANY WAYS, but you should not take it as representative of my usual tastes, and also it’s not one I can watch with the family.

I meant to ask you so many questions earlier, and then I got waylaid by Unexpected Holiday Baking, which was a delight, but on the other hand I didn’t ask my questions and tomorrow is Christmas Eve already, so some of the questions will have to wait.

We are, as I believe I mentioned somewhere back there in the archives, having our family’s very first Christmas Morning Christmas. Not one single member of this household has ever had one of those! (My family celebrated on Christmas Eve; Paul’s celebrated on Christmas Day afternoon.) La la la how fun! And also: how…do we do that.

Years and years of chatting with other parents of young children has given me lots of information for how to handle it with young children: the setting out of the cookies (and baby carrots for the reindeer); the firm establishment of The Earliest Possible Time Mother and Father May Be Awakened in the Morning; the opening of matching Christmas pajamas on Christmas Eve night, so that everyone is adorable for the photos the next morning even if they have not combed their hair or had their coffee; the reading of Christmas stories before bedtime; perhaps a dose of benadryl with the hot chocolate. I remember a lot of these tips.

But parents don’t talk to each other as fervently when they have older kids—and of course by then families aren’t trying to start/establish Christmas traditions: the traditions they started when the kids were little have morphed naturally into something else. So I don’t know how to START this when the kids are older. Our youngest is 13 and has to be awakened if we want him out of bed before 11:00 a.m. Possibly by now we would have morphed into an after-lunch Christmas. But THIS ONE YEAR AT LEAST we want a Classic Christmas Morning situation.

The children have done a hard pass on the idea of matching Christmas pajamas, even as a joke; I think we needed to have started it sooner, so that it would be ironic/nostalgic at this point, but it’s too late for that. They do accept the idea of ATTENDING in whatever pajamas they were already wearing. I don’t think we’ll set out cookies and carrots, though we’ve considered doing it just for the ha-ha-look-at-us-doing-traditional-Christmas fun of it.

I just don’t get how this is going to GO. Should we…set a time to meet downstairs? Or when you have older kids do you just start celebrating Christmas whenever they finally get up? That could be like 2:00 in the afternoon, and I don’t want that, so forget I asked the second question and just answer the first one.

Also, when do stockings happen? My family opened them Christmas Eve afternoon, as a badly-needed float for the children who were running out of patience to wait for the presents that were still hours and hours away (after the Christmas Eve service, which wasn’t until after dinner). And when do you FILL the stockings? (We filled them while the children were taking afternoon naps. When they got too old for naps, we filled stockings while the children were in their rooms pretending to nap, because stockings happen after naps—this is how that tradition morphed.)

What do you do about breakfast? The nice thing about starting festivities in the afternoon (both for my family, which started Christmas Eve afternoon, and Paul’s family which started Christmas Day afternoon) is that no one is eating stocking candy on an empty stomach. I have heard tales of hearty egg/potato-type breakfast casseroles assembled the night before and popped into the oven in the morning? If you have any good ones, I would LOVE to have the recipe: I don’t have ANY recipes for make-it-the-night-before breakfast casseroles. I have also purchased some festive danish, which freeze well if no one wants them after all the stocking candy.

Excuse me but those of us who partake in booze definitely put a little booze in our Christmas morning coffee, do I have that correct? I was thinking of a little swig of Bailey’s. My tolerance is probably too high to feel it, but I’LL FESTIVELY KNOW IT’S THERE.

What else? Oh, I know: WHAT DO YOU DO CHRISTMAS EVE?? I’m used to doing CHRISTMAS on Christmas Eve! So now I don’t know what to do with it. Theoretically I suppose I would do the same things I used to do Christmas Eve Eve, but that doesn’t feel right: Christmas Eve is A Thing in a way Christmas Eve Eve is not—even if you celebrate on Christmas Eve. We normally have Festive Snack Dinner (grapes, fancy crackers and cheese, kielbasa, vegetables and dip, popcorn, etc.) for Christmas Eve dinner, and we’re planning to go ahead and do that anyway, and then the usual Christmas Light Drive (which we started when I stopped going to a church service but still wanted something between dinner and presents).

And what do you do with THE REST OF THE DAY? One of the nice things about an evening celebration is that you take the strung-out overstimulated children afterward and you tuck them into bed, and then they wake up the next morning and one one hand they’re sad Christmas is over, but on the other hand NOW they can play with all their NEW TOYS / eat their YUMMY STOCKING CANDY! And the parents have had a good night’s sleep and are ready to find batteries and assemble things and play games. And it’s a nice peaceful day, with all the pressure off, and nothing left to do but enjoy presents and eat treats.

And what about Christmas Day LUNCH and DINNER? What do you do about THOSE??

If I may return to the subject of shipping woes, the package I sent to Paul’s sister still hasn’t budged. I signed up for email AND text alerts, since some commenters reported having success with that, but to no avail. It took from the 11th to the 15th to travel 20 minutes away, and nothing has happened since the 15th.

The gift cards I ordered on the 8th to give to UPS and USPS have not arrived, either; they were shipped USPS on the 9th, and the tracking info shows nothing since the shipment notification. Target still shows them as “arriving by the 18th,” even though today is the 22nd.

We got two Christmas cards in the mail yesterday. One was postmarked the 17th, which would be a normal sort of mailing time for this time of year, but the other was postmarked the 11th, so it took ten days to get to us, which would not be normal, even for this time of year.

One of Henry’s Christmas presents was shipped USPS on December 11th, and hasn’t been seen since. It’s fine, he’ll be okay with getting a wrapped notification that it’s coming sometime soon, but I’m worried it’ll be lost.

Rob said he read somewhere that to save time, the post office has stopped scanning as many things? I don’t know if that’s true, or if it even makes sense (i.e., maybe the scanning is inherent to the way they process packages, as opposed to being an extra step), but it gives me some hope. Rob said what he read is that people were refreshing the tracking page, which would show the package at a standstill, and then suddenly the package would just arrive. Well, isn’t that just EXACTLY what I’d like to happen with Paul’s sister’s package.

I keep finding my mind drifting to what if it’s just LOST? What if it burst open, the contents strewn throughout the package-processing system?? And then I turn my mind back to THERE IS NOTHING I CAN DO ABOUT THAT RIGHT NOW. And: I WILL DEAL WITH THAT IN REALITY IF IT TURNS OUT TO BE THE CASE, AND NOT MENTALLY IN ADVANCE.

Back to the more cheerful subject of holiday baking. Yesterday I was less zealous than the day before, but I made Triple Layer Cookie Bars and Flourless Fudge Cookies (Elizabeth: “I want to eat these for every meal”). Today I am thinking I’ll make Christmas Crack(er) and fudge/penuche.

It was comforting to hear that so many of you are also having shipping woes. I think it’s easier when everyone knows it’s happening to pretty much everyone, and this way we can all start prepping everyone that their gifts may be late. I emailed Paul’s sister and sent her the tracking number so she too can stare at it sitting twenty minutes from my house.

I went to the grocery store this morning. I’d been intending another curbside pick-up, but the curbside grocery store is still claiming not to have ground beef or chicken, and they say they have milk but last time didn’t have it when I got there, and also last time they forgot to put my freezer bags in the car so I had to drive over an hour round-trip to go back for them, and anyway I just went in person to my local grocery store instead. I do think it makes sense to use even patchy curbside in order to reduce the time spent breathing grocery store air, but on this particular day the hassle of building an online cart, putting in all the comments, driving an hour, and STILL having to go in person as well—it seemed like too much.

Still almost no regular cleaning supplies, though they DID have Clorox Clean-up spray, but I already have enough of that so didn’t buy any. Oh! That reminds me to tell you: when I went to pick up Edward’s prescription at Target, they had LYSOL SPRAY. Like, the tall linen-scented disinfecting spray cans of it, maybe ten or so cans just sitting there on the shelf like no big. I stood there, frozen, staring, stunned, and then my brain actually started saying fussily “Oh, but the caps are chipped” LIKE THAT MATTERS, and I overrode my brain and bought one. I brought it home and put it on the counter so I could gaze at it for awhile before putting it away.

Back to the grocery store. The only thing I wanted but couldn’t get was cherry jam, and that is not something that’s consistently in stock even in normal times, so I just put it back on the list for next time. Oh, and I looked for Ben & Jerry’s Cinnamon Roll ice cream because a friend mentioned it’s her favorite and I wanted to try it, and they didn’t have it, but this was not surprising because she’d mentioned it in the context of not having been able to find it for ages; I bought Oat of This Swirled instead: brown sugar ice cream with oatmeal cookies, OKAY!!

They had THREE kinds of holiday tea! I didn’t buy the gingerbread one because I don’t normally like things that are gingerbread-flavored, but I bought the peppermint bark and the egg nog kinds. I have low expectations, but I love having Holiday Coffee/Tea even if I don’t actually like it.

They also had Reese’s peanut butter chips, which I hadn’t been able to get in-store OR curbside/shipped from Target. And they had Grape-Nuts, which I hadn’t been able to get curbside or shipped from Target. They had the little red grapefruit fruit cups Edward likes. They had plenty of ground beef and chicken and milk. They had Cabot Pepper Jack cheese, which they haven’t had on my last two trips. Butter was on sale so I got four pounds, in case I suddenly start doing some holiday baking.