Lest I should forget to document it. (A couple of more photos to be inserted later, when I find them. Grr!)
We did have our Feliz Navidad which included two trees, family, Liam's crafts, guava paste and cheese hors d'oeuvres, Christmas music, a roast dinner, chocolate chip cookies, fruit smoothies, musica Colombiana, a bench, BeyBlades, Legos and more!
Musica Maestro
Liam is constantly signing or humming something. He's the son and grandson of classically-trained musicians after all (from Daddy's side, of course). He especially loves Christmas music! He's always busy singing or humming something Christmas-y, all thanks to a light FM radio station that plays Christmas music nonstop from the day after Thanksgiving to Christmas Day. Among his favorites are Jingle Bell Rock and Sleigh Ride (?). He dislikes "Santa Baby" because he says that it makes him "nauseous" which is exactly how I feel about "Feliz Navidad" by Jose Feliciano -it's the song that never ends. We did however hear a somewhat bearable version of Feliz Navidad by Michael Buble and Thalia. Also, on my least favorite Christmas song category is Feed the World (?) by various rock singers and that one country song about the little boy buying shoes to give as a Christmas gift to his dying mother. I mean, really. Anyway...
We certainly got to listen to a lot of Christmas music one late afternoon while sitting in traffic for 2 whole hours as we drove out to drop off dinner for a wonderfully large family that just had a new baby. Their 5th! We must have heard about four different versions of Sleigh Ride (?) in just that one sitting. It must have stuck because whenever we talk about the weather being lovely, he always sings out, "Come on it's lovely weather for a sleigh ride together with you. Our cheeks are nice and rosy and comfy cozy are we. Come on it's lovely weather..." It's pretty hilarious.
Oh Christmas Tree...
Liam loves Christmas! Liam reminds me somewhat of that little boy from the home alone movie in that he loves Christmas trees. He gazes at them almost hypnotically and always requests to have his picture taken by them. Like clockwork, he or I or both have been sick in December since he was born, so we had not been well enough to take him to see the big one at Rockefeller Center. But, this year was it.
So, it looks like some people have nowadays elected to send them out electronically. I'm not sure how I feel about that. It sure would be a welcomed relief, but I like to think about my family and friends as I write them. I also like to include our yearly family photo (above photo, minus the tongue which we didn't see him do).
At school, he was given a choice of either a star, angel, bell or tree cut out to make a Christmas tree ornament (essentially made out of flour and water). He, of course, chose a Christmas tree, painted it green and sprinkled it with glitter. Super cute! He was also pretty busy at school making other Christmas crafts: a reindeer, a gingerbread man, a wreath, and a Christmas card. Here at home, our advent calendar was a printout of Santa that got one cotton ball per day glued onto his beard until it was filled with twenty-five cotton balls.
As a side note, he was also taught all about Chanukah and the menorah, but not about the Nativity or the meaning of the Christmas tree which I thought was unfair. I didn't actually expect him to be taught about anything remotely religious since he is in a public school, but I just wish Liam would have told me about it earlier so that I could have spoken to his teachers about it. We ask him every day about school and all we got was his typical 4-year-old-boy answer, "I don't know... We played, made crafts, read, and sang songs." It wasn't until later when he and I overheard someone at the supermarket talking about the Jewish festivities on the morning of Christmas Eve, when he actually told me that "all they talked about was Chanukah all the time." There was nothing I could do then. Oh well, live and learn. Next year, I will actually speak with the teachers about what will actually be taught over December.
As it turned out he had quite a busy Holiday season with festivities at every turn. He had a Holiday party at school where they had milk and cookies, played secret Santa and sang "Holiday songs". Then, there was the party at Church where he sat ("again") on Santa's lap. He got a little present, a mini football, which he said was not on his Christmas list because he already has one. Oops. Many questions followed. Did Santa not get his letter? Did he not read it? Is he playing tricks? Etc. What an exhausting conversation that was!
Anyway, Liam set up our little Nativity set and also "helped" to decorate our Christmas trees at home: the main one in the living room and my little disco ball, table-top tree in the dining room. I never knew how stressful it would be to take on such a task with an over-excited, 4-year old. I'm sad that Liam accidentally broke two of my special ornaments, but it's my own fault for not anticipating the unavoidable. Regardless of how we think it turned out, trimming our trees was memorable for our little family, especially for our little boy. Now that Liam understands a little more, we have now introduced him to some family traditions. We place the really special ornaments, those that have real meaning to us, on the tree on Christmas Eve. These ornaments are our first Christmas as a married couple, Liam's first Christmas, one that my brother had made specially for me years ago, a little ornament that sort of represents my mother and four beautiful glass ornaments that my mother-in-law, Bette, gave us on our first Christmas as a married couple.
We also introduced our very own family tradition this year: the Santa sack! That's right, no more wrapping presents. We just gift tag everything, dump it in the sack on Christmas Eve before heading to bed and place the sack right by the Christmas tree. The Christmas sack was made by "Welita" of course. Then, the Santa sack just magically disappears at the close of Christmas day. Santa's elves pick it up! (wink)
Which reminds me... note to self: I must learn how to sew in 2012! My mother is an amazing seamstress. She retired a while ago from working for years in the fashion district for various designers sewing haute couture, while I can barely sew a button. It is an embarrassment that I hope to correct in 2012.
Uncle Moe and his huge family (sans Yvie, the eldest niece, who has elected to live upstate with her biological mother for a while) came over and spent Christmas Eve day with us. I cooked arroz con pollo and served it up with a simple side salad. After they left, I went to pick up "Welita" and we spent most of the evening with her, listening to her favorite Colombian music and enjoying special treats: Bill's special fruit smoothies and "bocadillos con queso" (courtesy of Welita) which is guava paste cut into cubes and served with cubes of Muenster cheese with toothpicks. Yummy! I baked chocolate chip cookies from scratch for the first time in my life, because you know, gotta leave cookies out for Santa. Not sure he would have liked the guava and cheese. Once again, he left a note for Liam thanking him for the cookies etc. even though they were kind of hard once they had cooled completely. I'm hopeless at baking. Our Christmas Day dinner was lemon and herb roasted chicken which we ate with roasted potatoes and salad. Again, yummy. I had every intention of making all sorts of Christmas goodies, but I got sick again (laryngitis?) and I just didn't have the energy.
Which brings me to this. The only places I had been to over those weeks was Church, Liam's school, the supermarket and Michaels. Someone somewhere was sick, maybe coughed too close to me, and somehow I got really super duper sick. Why do sick people go out in public? I mean really, I know I'm a big germophobe and all, but I can't really understand why sick people aren't more careful about not spreading their illness. If you've got a bad cough, stay the heck home and nurse yourself back to health. Ugh!
No big surprise there. Aside from my frilly-woolly scarf, Bill's super warm woolly socks, the bench (our Christmas gift to each other as a family) and a pre-school board game from "Welita", practically everything was about Star Wars from the Legos to the candy dispensers.
The most special family Christmas gift, though, in my opinion, was the bench. Love! It sits by the entrance where we take our shoes off and throw our hats, gloves, scarves inside.
I made baked doughnuts (from scratch) for our Christmas morning breakfast. So good I made them again for New Year's Eve morning. Yum!
Spin tops
Liam also got a special gift that was sent all the way from Japan: a BeyBlade spin top complete with its own string launcher. These spin tops are for ages 8 and up, but our 4 yr old little Liam learned how to play with him back in February 2011 when he was first introduced to them by a kid from senior Primary at Church. Along with Star Wars, it's all the rage here in our house.
Christmas and Boxing Day:
The better part of Christmas Day and Boxing Day were spent spinning tops and building Legos. To say that we were up to our eyeballs in Legos is an understatement. I never knew how satisfying yet stressful it would be to build Legos. You're searching and searching for the next piece, you start to panic, then suddenly you find it. This happens repeatedly, despite our best efforts in sorting the pieces into colors, size etc. Spinning BeyBlades was a welcomed break from all the Lego madness.
Also madness was a side-by-side comparison of the original Star Wars movie as it was released in theaters in 1977 and the edited version called "A New Hope". No words here. Only a pity party of one that included me.
Well, as I look back, there are some things that I pictured in my head that turned out great and not so great (like some of the photos I took or forgot to take). Some Christmas wishes went unfulfilled, but some wishes that I never dreamed in a million years came true. All in all, it was happy Christmas/New Years with my dear family and family is what matters most.
Now if only I could find all of my photos!
