An Early Christmas...

So Zed...uhmmm, Santa usually brings the presents but tonight your cousins, Brent, Avery and Reece, and your Aunt and Uncle, gave you a bunch. It's kind of hard to explain. See, at Christmas time people just kinda buy you stuff...and since they're leaving for a Christmas vacation and won't be around over the holidays, you get to open presents tonight. Got it? You get presents from Santa and then from other people too.

Zoey...shrug...squeal...roll around in all the discarded tissue and wrapping paper. Smiling and giggling a lot...I mean A LOT...and wear down a 3 month old puppy with all your craziness. I'm not kidding. Zo put a puppy to sleep.



The kids were wired, and ready to exchange boxes of goodness, and every grown up eye was eager to see the kids falling over themselves to get to their early bounty. Avery got the Courtney Avery Michigan football jersey that she was begging for...and Reece and Uncle B scored authentic New Orleans Saints jerseys to wear on Sundays...



Aunt Header got a lottery stuffed Mountain Equipment soft briefcase for gettin' her professionalism on. Beezer scored four tickets to the hockey game, for him and his buddies, which is pretty much every 14 year old's nearly perfect present...Zedder scored the most wicked winter sled from all of them for her wily winter adventures, and we snuck away with new concert DVDs, and Zeppelin's '75 American Tour book amongst other awesomeness.



How much more fun is Christmas becoming with a little girl who freaks out at the very whisper of it? Christmas was starting to get expensive and difficult to organize and meant sleeping on a cheap mattress on our parents floor so that we could wake up with family...now we've got our own family, and we can wake up somewhere other than on the floor at Gerry and Mihoko's...like maybe our own bed. In eleven years time we've never once slept in our own bed at Christmas. This year we will, and why not? Brad, Heather and the kids are gone...Netta and Ian can't get home until a few days after Christmas...and although the grnadparents, collectively, would sell their kidneys to spend Christmas morning with Zed, they're also cool enough to sit back and watch their own children become the kind of parents who have to make up Christmas stories, and leave out milk and cookies, and be shaken from their bed by a whacked out two year old all jacked up for Christmas morning. It's kind of the perpetual comedy of each generation and Zo's grandparents are happy to let in unfold somewhere other than their own living rooms. We'll see them all by the early afternoon, and then later that evening, so it's no biggie if we settle into our last Christmas here on the lake, and we do it the way it should be done...with Zed crawling out of her own and bed and losing her mind in her own living room, under her own tree...the one that she helped decorate.