Christmas Cards and Christmas Clutter

I love Christmas.

Besides the obvious "reason for the season", I love all the extra stuff that goes with Christmas.

I love the music. Even the cheesy music.

I love getting together with people.

I love making and eating all the goodies.

I love buying presents for people and wrapping them. (Isn't wired ribbon a fun and wonderful invention?)

I love all the traditions our family has...MOA shopping day, the "girl's" Christmas Brunch (held yesterday), the shopping, the wrapping, the cards, driving by the Mount Normandale houses at midnight on Christmas Eve to see all the luminaries on the way home from Mom's listening to the Superamerica Christmas Collection that Terry bought 25 years ago, the Christmas tree pineapple upside down cake that we have every Christmas morning which our neighbors have faithfully delivered for 22 years (and they moved away 12 years ago so aren't our neighbors anymore!), the Christmas crackers that pop and have a toy, a riddle, a joke, and a crown in them that we all put on for the Christmas picture.

Right now, the basement is entirely covered with wrapping paper, ribbon, packages, shopping bags and tissue paper. It's great.

We watched "A Christmas Story" last night. And, I'm hoping to watch "Elf" sometime again this week.

The agenda today was the cards. From start to finish, we did it.

We have found that making an adventure out of life's chores is the way to go. So, today we had an adventure. It started out with the adventure of figuring out why my Applework's address book had a major glitch. We never figured out why that happened, but we did manage to get it good enough to print out the labels.

Then it was off to Terry's office to print the return address on the envelopes. Of course, we have had the envelopes for a few days, but, again, if you are looking for an adventure, you don't do things ahead of time. Terry got the envelopes printing and I slapped together a Christmas letter. It's not the most interesting letter ever, but it's written!

Then, it was off to Southdale to pick up Beth (she had been shopping with Katie and Tim). K and T went to a movie (Eragon) and Beth came with us to Kinkos to print the letter and then to Starbuck's at the Galleria where for the last several years, Terry and I have settled in and folded, stuffed, labeled, stamped, and sealed the Christmas cards.

Having Beth to help made for quick work and we were done in less than 2 hours. On the way home we "swung" by the airport, dropped them in the mail, and headed home. A productive day.

I hope there are no typos on the letter. A person, (for the sake of this blog post we shall call her "Diane") told me tonight that they had all their letters printed and her husband (for the sake of this blog post we shall call him "Steve") did one final proof of the letter. They had done some "tweaking" and wound up with a sentence that said something like, "Diane continues coordinating the Lord..." So, last minute tweaking is not always a good thing.

I really hope our letter is okay, because it is mailed.

And, that is the end of my blog post for today.

Tomorrow it's cleaning and cookies.