The evil snowman who will haunt your dreams and I wish you a very happy holiday season!

Seriously, I can NEVER get enough of these…

I’ve gone and done it.

For the first time in at least ten years, I didn’t send out Christmas cards.

You see, I waited much too long to take a picture of the kids. I kept telling myself that we could wait one more week. What was one more week? But then things kept happening, and finally the weekend that was to be my final deadline came and went with all of us being sick and barely able to function, much less posing and smiling for a picture.

I can’t think of a worse recipe for a photo than two sick kids, one of them a toddler who has hit the terrible twos with a vengeance.

So I didn’t upload the picture, the card never got printed, I never had to go pick them up, and I didn’t have to spend a bunch of time addressing them.

I feel sort of bad about it, because I know many people look forward to having a picture of the kids.

But then again, I sort of don’t.

Maybe I could send out New Year’s cards?

53% of you have the baking gene, while 21% of you do not.  The other 25% give it their best shot.  I would say that I am a fairly good baker, but that I don’t seem to find the time to be able to do it as often as I would like.  Which with my toddler is like, never.  I have sworn, though, that I will bake some cookies for my son this year for the holidays.

Today I’m all about the holidays. Again.

Well, I tried to give Mark Consuelos an extra week to pick up some votes, but it was a no go. He garnered only 9% of the vote.  9%! That’s crazy, people! He is totally hot.

Anyhoo, I’ve got another celebrity father anxiously waiting in the wings to probably go down in flames against Mr. Brosnan.

Any Dawson’s Creek fans out there?  Or how about this?

Eh, let’s just get this over with, shall we?

VERSUS

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

As much as I love Dick Van Dyke, I just cannot bring myself to like this movie.

For some strange reason, I’d never seen it as a kid, and thus my first viewing was that of a cynical 40 year old, which may have something to do with it. My husband was stunned that I’d never watched it and insisted on telling me what a great movie it was.   Look, he said, it has a three and half star rating!  That’s one half off of a four star, so there was no way it could be bad.

Don’t believe the hype.

There are so many plot holes the mind simply boggles. And know it is an unfair comparison, but Sally Ann Howes?  The poor man’s Julie Andrews.  I told my husband there was a reason Julie is a household name and good old whatshername isn’t.  Listening to her caterwaul around her country estate in her fake hair for what seems like eternity about how she loves this guy she just barely met makes me want to throw the remote at the television.  A billion times.

The name Truly Scrumptious and all of the horrible songs about it that pepper the entire movie are JUST WRONG.  There should not be a famous movie with a character named Truly Scrumptious in it.  Hmmph.

The irony is my daughter adores all of the musical numbers in this thing, and I have had to endure them an untold amount of times.

Is there a classic children’s movie that you know you are supposed to like, but don’t?

Has retailers crying into their beers and parents doing a happy dance.

I have tried never to buy into the whole “must have” toy thing, although I know a lot of people do because of peer pressure and the like.  If the popular toy happens to coincide with the interests of my child, then great.  But if it doesn’t, I will feel not even a tiny pang of regret.

And is it just me, or am I the only one surprised to read in that article that layaway is back?

Maybe I come from a place of privilege when I say that I’m not a big fan of layaway.

If we can’t afford something, we don’t buy it.  We have had more than one Christmas when we told our son that Mommy and Daddy simply did not have the money to buy him oodles of things.  That he gets a lot from his extended family and we see no need to put ourselves in debt for some toys.  Did he get something? Yes, but one year it was pretty thin.

Again, maybe I know not of what I speak.

Anybody want to set me straight?

So we have a family that we are good friends with, who happens to have a son the same age as ours.  They are good friends, too.

The boy is an only child, and actually has four sets of grandparents, so he is definitely not lacking in the Christmas gift department.  And truly, like my son, he pretty much has everything he needs.  His parents have more than once told me they are of the mind that he has more stuff than he could ever possibly use. And if he did want something, it would probably be too expensive for me to buy it for him on my own.

I called his mom last week, and told her I had an idea.  I wanted to run it by her, and to make sure that she wasn’t thinking I was trying to wriggle out of gift-giving.

Instead of buying him yet more things he didn’t really need, I told his mom that I was thinking of taking the two of them out on a special outing, such as to an amusement park or a really fun place they don’t normally get to go.  He wouldn’t be getting a gift, per se, but getting what I would like to refer to as a “treat.”

His parents both enthusiastically agreed, and although it was of course my idea, I felt bad for a nanosecond that I wouldn’t be giving him an actual gift on Christmas.

What say you?

Good idea, or does it just look like I’m trying to get out of getting him a present?

Because truly, I’m not.