Whack-a-Mole

5am Christmas morning, both my brother F and I were awake for some reason and we got to talking about how our arms fall asleep because we sleep on our sides. It happens to me all the time. He said that one time both of his arms fell asleep and when he woke up he thought he was paralyzed or something. Could you even sit up? Yeah, I just had to swing my arms around like this to get the blood flowing again. And he did it and it was ridiculous, or maybe I was sleep deprived or maybe both.

On Christmases past we have always gotten up at 6am because that's the earliest our parents would let us. We all slept in the basement when we were little, and we'd get up at 5:57, gather all together, and then creep up the stairs together. The older siblings have fought getting up at 6 these last few years - I have always been strongly in favor of it - "it's tradition!" I say, but they grumble, and I only prevailed last year because Christmas was on a Sunday and we had to get up and do Christmas and still have time to get ready for church. Then there was the year my mom wanted us to sleep-in and she went around changing all the clocks, but she missed half of them and we woke up confused and arguing about whether it was really 5 or 6 in the morning. She's sneaky like that -I think it comes from living with dad for so long.

This year my mom had to work a 12 hour shift Christmas eve so she wouldn't be home until 8am. We had permission to do our stockings at the regular time still. F and I were going to bed and I noticed him taking a lot of time to set his alarm.
-What are you doing?
-I'm synchronizing our clocks so they go off at the same time.
-Oh. Mine's set for 5:57, not 6:00.
-That means I'll need to set mine for 5:55- your clock's two minutes faster than mine.

I don't know why he bothered to do this.

Clocks set, he proceeded to read, trying to finish 19 self-assigned pages of "The Count of Monte Cristo" before it turned 12:00.

-Why before midnight?
-I don't want to be awake for Christmas

This made perfect sense to me even if it made me laugh at first. You don't want to be awake for the transition between Christmas and the eve of - you want to wake up and have it hit you in the face that it's Christmas morning. Like I said, our mom was at work, but F, H2 and I got up at 6am as per usual and went into the living room where the tree is housed. I actually went downstairs first thing to creep up the stairs, trying to relive that moment when I would catch my first glimpse of the tree over the banister. It's not the same unless you're coming up the stairs Christmas morning.

F checked the family room to see if our stockings were out. They weren't. Mom always does that. They were still in our parents' room and when we went to get them the door was locked and we had to wake up our dad. Stockings in hand we retreated to the family room and dug through first our own stockings, then glanced a bit at our siblings' stuff, then retrieved our individual packages from under the tree. What to do now? I thought about showering, but that seemed sacrilegious - part of Christmas is being in your pajamas with bedhead and having that just-woken-up feeling. We had an hour and a half before anyone else was even thinking of waking up, so we watched Wallace and Gromit and I made toast for the 3 of us, and thought that it could be a nice tradition from now on.

Christmas eve we watch "It's a Wonderful Life"- George Bailey's character is simply hilarious, and so heartfelt - something about his face - I love the part when he comes home and all of his kids are hanging on him as he's trying to come down the stairs. I can't help but love this film; there's something simple and beautiful at its core.

I received some first rate gifts this year, some of my favorites being: The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, Green Squall by Jay Hopler, The Office: season two, Harry and Walter Go to New York, and an incredible plastic pith helmet from H that I wore all day today, or at least up until I took a shower-I thought it unwise to attempt to be fashionable while shampooing. I also got a phone - I don't quite know why. It may have been because H and M-Lite got phones and so my parents thought I would need one too. It's nothing fancy (for which I am grateful), just a little pay as you go Motorola type thing. I can't imagine I'll use it much - it's really just for emergencies, of which I usually have few to none. I now have a phone, and it makes me a little sad that I'm of the cell phone owning class. Oh well.

My dad got a whack-a-mole game, and how else can I put it, but his face lit up like a child's on Christmas morning. Going to Chuck E. Cheese's he always played their version that has gators, and when we were in Disney World this summer he beat out a bunch of small kids at it and won a stuffed yellow dinosaur, which he proudly carried around and now has displayed in his room.

Let me take this opportunity also to say that I'm grateful for this time of year - for what it does to people, how it gives us perspective, how it changes us for the better. I have hope that I can be a better person. I have faith that life will work out. We have a fresh year ahead of us, and I want to believe that anything is possible, as trite as that sounds. I love my family. I love my friends. I'm grateful to have the gospel in my life. The lesson on Sunday was about work and our teacher quoted "The Little Prince" to us - the part after the part about the fox about the rose, and I wondered what had I ever labored for? what was my rose? I don't really know, but I hope to find out.

I didn't get to writing about everything that I wanted to and this is already the world's longest post. In my next posts I hope to include more stuff on Portland, kitchen dancing, becoming registered to vote, and some over-the-break happenings. I'll be flying back to Provo on the 5th, and I'm hoping to have an Office marathon sometime soon thereafter. Think like a boyscout and be prepared.

And one thing I forgot - every year our dad hides a pickle ornament on the tree and we hunt for it. Whoever finds it wins five dollars. This year he did three - two small ones in addition to the main pickle. We attacked each other to get to the tree, frantically combing its branches for the briny baubles. I found the big one, and my sister F, the two smaller ones. I love tradition.