Not Winning Christmas

In keeping with the Christmas pile tradition:

Joe's pile

My pile

Our pile

This year, my mom made everyone stuff. Special awesome stuff. Like the table runner here, and the two pillowcases with Charlie Brown Christmas fabric. Heirloom stuff.

The pink giraffe, sewn by my sister, is a replica of an ornament made for us by one of my grandmas. I think my little sister and I fought over ownership of it at one point, and she won. This year, she made Joe and me these little guys. LOOK WHO WON NOW!

Speaking of winning, my parents compete each year to see who can give the other the best Christmas presents, who will "win Christmas." I guess Joe and I kinda do that too. It's okay for my parents, because their birthdays are in the middle of the year and within a month of each other, but Joe and me...his birthday was three months ago. He got cool stuff. There was nothing cool left to get for him for Christmas, especially since he never wants anything.

That is why my most exciting gifts were a Razer gaming mouse and mousepad and a Razer keybaord, while his most exciting gift was a case of a discontinued flavor of Canada Dry ginger ale.

I don't think there are many gifts we could give each other that would change our lives much. I came to the conclusion that whatever I got Joe, it would be about making his life better while he played video games.

It reminds me of the olden days, Christmas in my family, when we all played together and Christmas gifts were video cards, RAM, and EverQuest expansions.

Now We Can Have Christmas.

I cleaned the house yesterday. Now we can have Christmas.

My living room and kitchen were 'kay. They get tidied up almost every day (except on the weekends when I'm too busy sitting in front of my PC for 12 hours, eating out of Tupperware and cans.) However, every other room in our house looks like the inside of a closet. I throw stuff in and shut the doors and say "Look how nice and perfect it is in the living room, Joe!" and just try not to think about it.

But the more unperfect it gets, the more it bothers me. I start to feel...sort of stretched...like butter scraped over too much bread. (LOL that was from Lord of the Rings. I made myself laugh.)

In April. note the Christmas tree.

Constantly in the back of my mind as I went about my daily business was the massive cascading pile of a year's worth of cardboard boxes on one of our enclosed porches that I've been avoiding. You can't have Christmas with the haunting presence of a pile of empty boxes hiding, waiting. So, finally, Joe and I flattened them all and took them downstairs.

Someone didn't want to have Christmas with those couches.

I put like three of those giant trashbags there. And the cardboard pile, it doesn't look so big now that it's flat. That white spiral is the base of the fan I put out to keep the cardboard from flying away, at least until someone takes the fan not knowing that it got fried months ago when I plugged it straight into a 220 outlet.

That's the porch last year, when we first moved in. Before the boxes and the frying.

It's amazing how you can re-home anything instantly here. Just put it downstairs, and someone will take it within a few hours. Bag full of rancid recyclable milk bottles? Gone. Dead microwave with sign on it saying "broken" in English and Korean? Gone. $20 bill? Gone. That pile of cardboard (and the fan, of course) was already gone this morning, and the trash guys don't even work today.

So. I got the unperfect room organized. Thank goodness for that giant cabinet I found outside. (See? put anything downstairs, and someone will come along and get their very kind friends to help them stuff it into the elevator and drag it into their apartment.)

Also, I cleaned out our four "stuff drawers," and the fridge, and the freezer, and a few weeks ago I cleaned up the other porch. All that's left now is NOTHING. Christmas morning, whenever that is - I think this year it will probably be on the afternoon of the 26th, but some years it's at night on the 27th or 28th after we drive back home from visiting our families - will be peaceful and beautiful and lovely and I won't have to feel like butter at all.

In other news, on the 15th, I had a party. There were red ribbons hanging from the windows of my apartment so people could find it more easily. So many people came over with delicious food and spent time together. It was nice to be with almost all the ladies I like here in Korea (though there were a few missing - sad.)

Advent calendars. I love them. These were the only ones they had at the PX. I bought them, we ate some of the days, then we forgot about them. Joe had maybe nine advent chocolates to eat yesterday, the lucky duck.

We made a business trip to Seoul. On the way, we stopped at Osan Air Base's Chili's restaurant. This is the only place we've been in Korea where we get American food with American service. I mean, just LOOK at this, guys!

Yes, those are both mine! One of them has been dranken (hehe, "dranken") out of until it's almost gone. AND THEN OUR WAITRESS BROUGHT ME ANOTHER ONE EVEN THOUGH MY FIRST ONE WASN'T EMPTY YET.

If you're like, "Yeah................cool........?", then you OBVIOUSLY haven't eaten at a restaurant in Korea. Think of the second-worst service you've ever gotten at a restaurant, and you're pretty much thinking of what it's like here all the time. Maybe it's because servers don't get tipped in Korea. You get a drink after you arrive, like normal, and you'd better make it last until your food comes so you can ask the server for another one, and then you'd better make that one last through your meal because you can pretty much expect to never get another drop unless you go wandering around with your cup until you find out where the Coke comes from.

Then, there's this.

Some nights, moving the furniture in the living room and dragging our mattress out of the bedroom, watching Christmas movies (It's A Wonderful Life and Die Hard,) the Christmas tree the last light to go off before we sleep. Retreating so deep into home that time stops. Love. Love.

It's Christmas Eve now. We'll play video games and go to the grocery store and check the mail. Dinner will be crockpot BBQ ribs with cornbread and sweet tea, and Christmas morning will be in a couple of days. It'll be perfect.

Annual Shoe Candy

I spent a couple hours of my super-busy Army Wife day yesterday with a thread and needle and a bag of cranberries to make a garland for our Christmas tree. I also made "orangeaments," dried slices of orange with twine threaded through holes at the top, to be hung on the tree. (Last year, I had dried slices of apple as ornaments too, but this year that didn't work out very well so it'll just be the oranges.)

The funny thing about having all these natural ornaments for our Christmas tree is that our tree is made out of plastic and lead.

Anyway. When I was growing up, every year St. Nick - not to be confused with Santa - well, he kind of is, just on a different day - would visit after we went to sleep on the night of December 5th. He'd leave candy in our shoes for us to discover in the morning. I'm pretty sure the reason he visited us and skipped most of the other people in the U.S. (and Korea) is that my mom's family is German, and St. Nick is also German, so he likes us. He still visits me, and now Joe, too.

I got the best of three seasons: Christmas candy, Cadbury creme eggs, and a caramel and marshmallow and chocolate pumpkin. St. Nick knows exactly what my favorites are. I love how the cranberry garland was used to decorate, too.

Joe got a lot less than me, probably because St. Nick thought he'd be happier that way. Just one box of Moose Munch and one Hillshire Farms lunchmeat tupperware full of handmade sugar-free peanut butter cups that tasted like they probably should have been thrown away but St. Nick probably ran out of chocolate after making a second failed batch of them and decided to just go with it. Still, half of the peanut butter things are gone.

Maybe I'll have some candy left by Monday. Probably not. That box of Milk Duds is already empty.