Christmas Without Family

So you decide to spend Christmas at home with your immediate family...Husband, kids and whoever you consider close enough to invite over. It is a feeling of relaxation but then you realize...you miss the chaos. Yup! Unfortunately, you can't make the trip back home since you've spent money on the Thanksgiving trip. Ohh, that Thanksgiving trip you can't forget...The sense of being a family, regardless of whether you want to kill each other or not, love one anthter or not. Then you have the neice telling you about her "experience on the blow up matress next to her mother's bed" OMG! is all you can think. The staying up late and having a midnight snack with your sisters and nieces. Those were some great moments! You smile at the thought that bring tears. Such is life.

So you stay home, and you feel that you are the only one that stayed behind to miss the fun and time with your family, your dad. God only knows if it will be his last one. Sniff, Sniff!! I'm at home now and thankful for the time I have, even if means the kids fighting or a few moments of a good time. They act ungrateful and sometimes grateful of being here with you. They also miss their cousins, aunts, uncles, grandpa, godparents, and make believe cousins(you know your compadres kids that you just tell them to call cousins, aunts and uncles even though they are not related). Us Mexicans, everybody is family. You also have that Brazilian cousin that's married to your real cousin who claims he always has to live by "his wife's rules and yaddi yaddi yadda". Poor guy, makes you wonder if he'll stay sane in this family.

I grew up always spending holidays with family, even if it meant to get there first so you wouldn't be "the one they would be talking about". I will miss them dearly and sadly and will not be part of making those memories. I'll be at home making my own memories without them. I will think of everyone of them and smile as I do. As I realize now, we grow up and have to make "grown up" decisions. The ones that consist of staying at home because you can't afford to travel. With pain in my heart because I will be missing them, but lots of joy because I know they are still smiling this Christmas hopefully thinking of us as we are of them.

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT!
xoxo