Thursday, December 25, 2014

Have A Very Merry Christmas!

I was plannin on mopin' around for Christmas. It would be so easy. Just wallow around, feel sorry for being All By Myself like Eric Carmen, but not as rich. Cry in my Christmas beer. Well, not actually IN the beer, that would be gross.
Whine in my Christmas wine.
Okay, scratch the whinin' I'm not a whino.

You get where I'm coming from, right? It's the first Christmas after...
Without...her.
Without...my love.
Without...a really good punch-line.

However, a funny thing happened as I was plannin' how I could maximize my mopiness (that's mopyness, not mop...you know what I mean).
I realized this would be the last thing she would want for me to do.
Well, maybe not the last thing. There are worse things than monopolizing mopyness, afterall. Let's not blow this thing out of proportion.

Where was I? Oh yeah, a funny thing happened. No wait, after that. I realized sure as she was sayin' it to me herself that Patti would not want me mopynizin' on Christmas.

Patti loved Christmas. It was her favorite Holiday of the year. Not because of gifts, at least not material ones, but because of the real meaning of Christmas:
Hark The Herald Angels Sing, Glory To The Newborn King! The Christ the King!
Made sense, since Jesus is the greatest gift of all.

Patti loved Christmas songs as well. And all the good Christmas shows. Decorating the house and making everything brighter and more beautiful.
Cooking and spending time together. Talking to the kids when they couldn't be here. Driving around at night to see the Christmas lights some folks put up.

When we would say grace at Christmas dinner she would thank our Lord for our children, for all His blessings upon us, and even for me.
She made me feel special, but in a good way.

On our first Christmas together, which was the second year we were married because I was on a WestPac deployment during what would've been our first Christmas, I recall the look of bewilderment on Patti's face when she opened up a gift I had gotten her.
It was dishwashing gloves.

Guys, never give cleaning supplies as gifts to your wife. They don't count. Seriously.

But rather than get angry about my snafuey faux pas Patti laughed about it, and would continue to laugh about it whenever she remembered it.
Of course, funny as it was I never repeated that snafuey faux pas. Well, not that particular one anyways.

One of Patti's favorite parts of Christmas was seeing the joy on our daughters faces when they opened their gifts, and spending time with them, doing stuff with them, and me.

During our first few years of marriage, when money was more scarce than Bigfoot in the Mojave desert, Patti's joy around Christmas was no less, because it was never about material things, it was about God and family.

Patti brought more joy to Christmas, no doubt about it.
And she still does.

Merry Christmas Patti and thank you!
And Merry Christmas to you guys! I hope you don't consider me presumptious in thinking that you all are family to me.