I have reached a new level of procrastination.

I am currently procrastinating by researching procrastination in college students.

I think I need help.

Also, so not fair for that book which was an extrusion of parental duty to tell me the facts of life to replace some actual fun presents.

That is so worse than underwear.

We wrapped presents under the tree that we open Christmas eve, and there's no particular whimsy involved, except that I keep putting different variations of her name on my sister's presents. Mother doesn't sew as much as she did, but one thing that became a tradition was that there was always at least one thing she had meant to make for one of us for Christmas and didn't get around it, so she wrapped the fabric, pattern and notions as a present. When we were small, we had to wait until a particular time (7? 8? I disremember) before we woke up our parents, and we couldn't go into the living room until everyone was up. I remember sitting in out room with my sister watching the clock. I never went into the living room, but remember standing in the hall trying to see what was under the tree, but only seeing the glints off the tinsel and ornaments. As we got older, the presents from Santa were usually little things and things that were hard to wrap. At some point, I realized that Mom was filling the stockings, and we started wrapping little things and stuffing them in her stocking before we went to be. Now "Santa" just does the stockings.

Mother made our stockings out of felt. I reproduced mine for the greatnieces [link] The stocking she made for herself said "Mommy" and she accidentally embroidered an extra hump in one of the M's. My sister's original stocking was pretty prefunctory, since my mother had quite enough to do dealing with my sister, and I made her a new one in my teens.

This would all be very warm and fuzzy if Christmas was not alcoholics' very favorite drinking holiday.

I'm now at the airport waiting for my flight to Dallas. The good thing is I was able to score an upgrade to first class for the flight from Dallas to Burbank.

The bad part is that you're going through the Dallas airport. I hate that airport.

Up until this year I never had a problem with DFW, but lately I've been having nasty delays there. Basically what it comes down to is I can fly direct from Los Angeles to most places, but I have to deal with LAX, which I hate, or I can connect, usually through DFW, and fly out of Burbank, which I love.

I always got a tangerine in my stocking, which was useful in those mornings. We went to my paternal grandmother's place in Pennsylvania every year for xmas (only time of the year anyone got up the nerve to visit her) and the deal was that kids could get up and pillage their stockings at any time in the morning, but full on presents weren't opened until after lunch when all the family was assembled from around the city.

One adult had to be awake for stocking unstuffing, and they would take turns year to year for who had to get up early with the kids and who got to sleep in. We all knew it was parents and not santa stuffing the stockings, as my cousins' gifties were wrapped in different paper than mine.

I also usually had an assortment of hard peppermints in my stocking as i traditionally got violently ill every year and spent most of xmas day in the bathroom retching. Something about being in grandmother's extremely cold house made me sick. (In retrospect, she made also have been sneaking her famous home-made mayonnaise into the creamed chipped beef we had for breakfast. Or my vegetarian tendencies were already being encouraged by an unhappy tummy )

Violent retching is not a good Christmas tradition.

That same curmudgeonly grandmother also made stockings for each of her grandkids - i still have mine, red with elaborate cross stitch embroidery with my name and an elaborately decorated tree. I also have a green gingham stocking from after my parents separated, when mom liked to do a stocking at her place as well as one with dad's family.

We put out a plate of cookies for santa and carrots for the reindeer on xmas eve, and my father prided himself on personally knawing down the carrots to make them look (in the morning) like reindeer had chowed on them - unpeeled and uncleaned. yuck! Aunt Nancy lucked out and got cookie-eating duty. I found out about this a few years ago over a dinner with lots of wine. I now understand when dad always protested my desire to leave out hay for the reindeer, since it would be a PITA for santa to have to hand feed carrots to the reindeer when he was clearly on such a tight delivery schedule.

My cat refused to let me sleep this morning.

Violent retching is not a good Christmas tradition.

This is why i hated visiting grandmother. I've managed to outgrow that tradition, what with the no longer eating nasty things like venison and beef :)

All of my grandparents were thousands of miles away, so they weren't part of the Christmas tradition. At times I'm kinda thankful for that. Also most of them had passed away by the time I was five.