even Christmas changes

I finally have a little chunk of time to blog, inbetween LB's 4:30 a.m. feeding this morning, and Tom getting up at 6 to go to work. I couldn't sleep last night... I'm too wound up about the holidays, about our first Christmas together. The actual day shouldn't be so important to me, but it is.

My parents moved to Kelowna this past weekend. We were going to go and help unpack, but they were delayed and we weren't able to juggle a trip out there around Tom's work. They arrived in Kelowna at 5:30 p.m. on Sunday and unpacked the truck till 2:30 a.m. An hour after they arrived, the power went out, so they spent a few hours unpacking in the snow with nothing but 4 flashlights for light. And at some point during the unpacking, the truck shifted while my dad was in it, and the top part of my mom's china cabinet came tumbling down. Fortunately he had just crouched to pick something up, otherwise, it would have hit him. I hate hearing about those kinds of things after the fact. I'm more than relieved that nothing happened, but I feel so powerless to help out here.

At least this year, after 10 years of living in the US, my mom will finally get a white Christmas.

We were going to drive out there on Boxing Day (26th) to spend a few days with them, but we decided to drive out on Christmas instead because I just can't stand the thought of not seeing myfamily on Christmas. It's the one day of the year that I remember my dad actually slowing down enough to relax, to sit on the couch and read or listen to music while my brothers and I sat in a whirlwind of gift wrap enjoying our presents, getting along... My parents would get up early as usual, but not as early as my brother S, who would then come into my room and wake me up. My other brother, D, seemed always content to sleep in. S and I would go down the hall and take in that first moment of magic, seeing the tree all light up, pinpoints of light reflecting off the packages, stockings stuffed and waiting to be emptied. We'd put on some Mannheim Steamroller, our traditional Christmas day music, if, come to think of it, my dad hadn't put it on already. I think there were a few years as we got older that he would be up before us, filling the house with the sound of Christmas.

It was always such a peaceful day... and now things are changing so that it's my turn to be the mom and the wife on Christmas day and within a couple of years it will be LB who is getting up all excited on Christmas morning. I hope she'll come into our room and wake us up, hurry us along so we can enjoy the magic of the morning.

My brothers are all grown up, I realized recently. D will be graduating high school early in January, and he's accepted a job that will take him first to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. S will be in school till at least the end of this school year, but after graduating I think he'll return to the great North, being the extremely loyal Canadian that he always has been. Gone are the Christmas mornings of assembling countless Lego creations... now it's all about the band t-shirts and Ipod paraphanalia (early morning spelling)--not exactly the stuff of our childhood.

But I'm determined to take us back as far as we can go this Christmas. We will have a white Christmas, and I'm envisioning toboganning, and card games in front of the fire.