Christmas Fail from 2011

I haven't even read through this. It must have been from 2011, just calculating M and V's ages:

Well, folks. This Christmas was the Christmas for which we have "Done the least." The truth is, I am a Christmas fanatic (minus overspending). I LOVE sending thoughtful Christmas cards, choosing and decorating a real-live fragrant tree, making Christmas cookies, sending a few Christmas boxes to family with some fancy wrapping paper, making ornaments, baking Christmas cookies in sweet shapes...

But this year was different. I was just too too busy, and R was as well. We shopped for the girls on Amazon.com, and supplemented with some small items we'd picked up here and there in the past several months. We are so thankful to have family members who treat the girls each Christmas...Christmas morning has always been a very exciting and plentiful morning for the girls.

I have to admit it: I feel incredibly guilty and sad about not sending Christmas cheer to the people we usually send cards and boxes to. It tugs at me. Nobody I love would demand a card, gift, or craft...but I wanted to so badly. The timing of my rotations this year literally left me running on an average of 3-4 hours of sleep per night (or day) and profoundly occupied. I literally had nothing left over. What I did have left over amounted to several hours on Friday and Saturday that I spent making my 2 (of twelve total) stations of the Nativity - a project at church that I had committed to a month before in a fit of crazed ambition. I can't shake that bereft feeling of falling so far short of my Christmas goals. I'm not relating this to make myself out as some sort of Suzie Homemaker who just couldn't outperform her neighbors this year. I count my "Christmas efforts" on average to be a little unconventional, low on actual purchasing, and very home-made. But they mean a lot to me. They're my way of honoring the occasion of Christ's birth and celebrating with others.

We finally did actually make Christmas cookies. This week. I spent all day Monday studying and working on research proposal stuff, and by the end of the day sensed the closing-in feeling of school starting again. I put everything down, got out the Crisco and whole wheat flour and said aloud, "Who wants to make CHRISTMAS COOKIES?" And Some People did, ages 8 and 6! This is the kind of scheduling flexibility that keeps the show going around here.

But no cards, no boxes, not even an e-mailed link to a Christmas video. I ask your forgiveness.