half-assed christmas

Half a dog ass. (Again.)

When I wrote Iced by Scrooge at the beginning of December, I was just joking around. Sure the toppling Christmas tree was an inconvenience, but we tied it up, took all the breakable ornaments off the tree and proceeded to go about our merry way through December.

I tried to keep my sense of humor throughout the month and started tagging my lame attempts at getting into the Christmas spirit (and anything that went wrong) as #halfassedchristmas on Instagram. Supporting your Christmas tree with string and dumbbells is definitely half-assed. So is decorating by dumping Christmas balls into a bowl. I sent my Christmas cards out on December 20th. That was definitely half-assed. (But they were actually wedding announcements, not Christmas cards, so I figured I get a pass...except our wedding was nine months ago...)

We can't do it all. #halfassedchristmas was funny and reminded me not to take things too seriously during a usually busy and stressful month.

Little did I know that come December 23rd, #halfassedchristmas would bite me in the ass. Larry and I had gone out to dinner for my birthday. It was a 45 minute drive home from the restaurant, and within two minutes of walking in the door, Larry was hit by a violent stomach flu that left him retching and feverish for the next two days. Poor guy. He spent Christmas Eve shivering and sweating on the couch:

We cancelled Christmas Eve dinner and Mom brought us a pizza. I told Larry not to bother wrapping my gifts, but that evening he dragged himself upstairs to wrap in the bedroom while I was frantically baking downstairs in the kitchen. I later went upstairs and found this:

Larry went to bed and I stayed up by myself on Christmas Eve to finish baking a peppermint cheesecake. I had planned to decorate it with white chocolate trees. I melted the chocolate, put it in a bag and began to pipe the trees onto waxed paper. They came out perfectly:

Well, shit. The melted chocolate caused the bag to explode and there was no way that clumpy mess was going to look like a tree anyway. I was over it. Merry freaking half-assed Christmas! It was time for bed.


Larry was still sick on Christmas Day, so we had a low-key Christmas morning together and then I went out to Maryland to have Christmas dinner with my extended family:


When I got home, the patient was still shivering on the couch. I tried to get him to rally for a family Christmas photo - it was our first married Christmas after all! This is what I got:

Oh well.

I later heard that we weren't the only ones who had a crappy Christmas this year. Multiple friends had sick children, home disasters, and minor tragedies befall them. I DEMAND A DO-OVER!


But in between the frustrations, there were some good bits to the month:

A birthday text from my mom that made me teary.


A good haircut. A friend who left homemade rum cake and wine dressed as a sock monkey on my doorstep.


A birthday cocktail called a Mexican Warhead. A hilarious book given to me by my oldest friend. A birthday celebration with friends from all different periods of my life. (So much fun that I forgot to take pictures.)


Larry and I both giving each other instruments for Christmas: ukulele for me, strumstick for him. (We have a habit of accidently giving each other very similar gifts.) Flickering candles.


A delicious Christmas dinner. And the peppermint cheesecake was a hit, even without the white chocolate trees.


And as always, the cutest pups. We didn't give them anything for Christmas but used wrapping paper. And they loved it. (They also got to lick out some peanut butter jars...)


And New Year's Eve on the beach in the Outer Banks. I didn't take out my Nikon the entire weekend, but there was a hilarious game of Cards Against Humanity, a bonfire on the beach as the clock struck midnight, a tumbler full of Dom Perignon, and the white flash of naked flesh as drunk people skinny- dipped in the frigid Atlantic in the wee hours of the new year. (No photos of that part, and to clarify, the naked fools were not part of our group!)

So those were our holidays this year. Our first married Christmas was rather half-assed and crappy, but hey, that just leaves room for improvement! But right now I am over it. It's time to move on. Don't let the door slap ya on the way out, December 2013!