I want to start this post with the sentence, “Sorry to be a giant downer.” Because yep.

A friend invited me and Brad to a New Year’s party thing at a bar close to campus. I thought to myself, “There is no way we can get a babysitter on New Year’s Eve,” and didn’t give it another thought.

Well, my friend met a friend there, who (the friend of the friend) later walked two blocks home to her house and was murdered by a stranger waiting inside. Austin’s first homicide of the year. Two other women were assaulted nearby the same night. The details are so, so bizarre.

I didn’t know this person, but by all accounts, she was a complete gift to the world. She was 29, and she loved music. She worked as a special ed teacher’s assistant in an elementary school, and for a local organization that gets girls interested in music. A friend of hers started a tumblr to compile pictures, stories, and music from her friends. I keep looking, and it’s just Too Sad. (I don’t want to link to it because I have gross feelings about linking to a memorial for someone I didn’t know.)

I just don’t understand this, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

It is New Year’s Eve.

I am hard at work on a grocery list template. Brad has just provided me two of the largest, best margaritas I have ever had. Oh, so very nice. My kids are watching “PeeWee’s Playhouse,” an all-time favorite of mine that they now enjoy thanks to DVD. The last episode they watched was copyrighted 1989. I was 13 in 1989. I so love(d) that show.

Griffon is entirely too excited about staying up late tonight. Archie doesn’t get to. The big kids are also (but less) excited.

It is a good eve. Maybe not as good as when we saw Prince at Texas Stadium that one time (wooooooooooooooooooooooohoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo), but good. Happy Holidays, friends. 2012 is not the last year of Earth. You heard it here first.

Hello, friends. How have your holidays been so far?

It’s after midnight, and I have not even started watching the forensics show I’ve been watching before sleep these days.

This is what happens. Left to my own devices – with no obligations, like work – my circadian rhythm goes all haywire, and I stay up later and later until I’m regularly staying up through the following morning. I went to sleep at 1 a.m. last night. Thought I was on the mend, but no.

This is no bother, except that (a) Brad usually ends up dealing with the children solo in mornings, and (b) it is a terrible, awful thing to have to slam yourself back into a routine (we go back to work and school next week).

So. Christmas. As usual, my kids got way too much stuff. The three bigs went home with my mom Monday and stayed through yesterday, which gave me an opportunity to clean out their ridiculous toybox. I am a regular purger – of the material goods, not bile, variety – so it never gets TERRIBLE, but Christmas is just about my limit. Candy, chocolate, toys, new clothes, art projects and materials, Christmas ornaments and tree bits, food, strings of lights, special dishes and towels, new things you have absolutely no idea where to store, … It is almost too much.

This year was a little better, as we’ve stopped the comprehensive gifting process with my extended family, and we did my family’s stockings and Brad’s family’s gifts a week before Christmas. This gave me some time to get all that stuff – toiletries, toys, candies – put away before comprehensively gifting the least extended part of my extended family last weekend.

Comprehensive gifting was good, but again: Too Much. I love Christmas, and I love the tree and the lights and the warmth of it all, but I also love so much when it’s over.

Today, Brad put away all the Christmas stuff while I took a nap on the couch (see above: screwy circadian rhythm). Pretty sweet… I fell asleep in a Christmas house and woke up to NO CHRISTMAS TREE. I am amazed every year at how much brighter and cleaner the house looks when we take the tree down.

And now I’m thinking about New Year’s.

I only really started to appreciate New Year’s recently. Before a couple years ago, I didn’t understand why people made resolutions or what the big deal was about a new… Year, I guess.

I don’t know why I get it now, or what’s changed. It’s exciting to me, though, January 1st. It’s a new (arbitrary) beginning, like you can make whatever changes you want to make… and you don’t know what big events will forever be labeled as having occurred in 2012. I think back to past New Year’s Eves, what’s changed and what’s stayed the same. It’s a good marker for thinking about big things, life direction/priority type things.

(Whoa. I just looked back to what I (thought I) blogged at last year’s end, and it was 200NINE, not 2010, when I did that. I completely failed to address the new year last year. (Cool. This is why I win at blogging.))

So, how have you been? And what changes – IF you want to make any – are you planning for 2012?

I haven’t posted anything in more than three weeks. Huh.

It’s kindof against my nature to be thankful for things. I’m too busy being pessimistic to be content. Terrible, I know, but it’s good in some ways. It keeps me restless and looking for ways to make things better.

If I were to stop and really think about the great things in my life, though, it would be these things:

• Brad still loves me, even though I am crazy, even though I’m ridiculous, even after almost 15 years
• Our four healthy children
• Grandparents (mine and my kids’)
• Music (I’ve been on a Bradford Cox kick again)
• Breaking Bad (we just started Season 3 – DON’T TELL ME)
• Even though it’s way too warm for November, it’s been BEAUTIFUL recently (sleeping with the windows open beautiful)
• Books (do you like these very general categories I’m using, rather than expanding to tell you what I’m reading?)
• The paint and pictures that have been sitting on the floor by the utility room all up, AS OF TODAY
• Seattle in April
• Las Vegas in January?
• Feeling for the first time in my life like I can pay all our bills without trying to rig something every month
• Anneke’s excitement at learning to use a phone (this is a whole other conversation)
• Clean house
• Footie pajamas
• Archie’s adorable, ridiculous mess of a haircut
• Alcohol (I know, devil’s plaything) and finding that neat bar by our house last weekend
• My kids’ school
• Archie’s words (“Pidermansss”)
• Anneke doing a lot more art this week due to her GROUNDING FROM ELECTRONICS
• Great friends, including some with whom we spent Thanksgiving yesterday
• Christmas trees
• New year, new start
• Brad reading In the Night Kitchen to the Little Boys
• Cherry pie (she’s my)
• The hammock
• Robot
• Chat at work (how would I surviiiiive without?)
• Kieran using my dad’s/my childhood bed set
• Coffee
• A working oven
• Backyard grass growing back
• Anneke helping me clean Wednesday (so great)
• My favorite time of year (now) (it’s the most wonderful)

I hope you all have as much.

Good morning

Kieran in his new magician’s hat

Doing a trick for Gigi and Poppy

One of the biggest gift hits of the day

Just before he broke the tambourine with the maraca

The first rule of Triangle Club is don’t talk about Triangle Club

Yummy

Everyone is asleep. Minus me.

The children got lots of toys and clothes and good things today. Brad cooked lunch. We all played Farkle. (I won.) Griffon screamed. A lot. Archer and the big kids were happy most of the day. I yelled too much.

Three of the children are sleeping in pajamas tonight; that’s always the sign of a good day.

Happy Christmas, friends. I’ll post some pictures from our day soon.

Less than a week left in the year.

All children are awake.

Santa presents were bigger hits with Anneke and Kieran. (Anneke got a Hello Kitty water dispenser for her room. Kieran got a Dungeons & Dragons starter set.)

We are now waiting for grandparents and great-grandparents and Uncle Drew to arrive. Kieran is playing Guitar Hero (I made him stop singing and start playing guitar because OMGOMGOMGZOMG KILL ME). Griffon is singing along into a miniature train car. He just sang his own line: “Big boys and not grils!” Anneke is making a princess picture with stickers. Archer is alternately napping/screaming. Brad is doing whatever. I am giving feedback on a dissertation proposal for my “other” job.

THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT IS UNBEARABLE.

Two of my children are awake.

Archer’s Santa present is a big tunnel like the one he likes at school. Except that he appears to be slightly afraid of and/or disinterested in this one.

Griffon’s Santa present is a SpiderMan backpack, something he has been talking about for, oh, I don’t know, a YEAR. We always said once he became an Explorer (the oldest, 3.5+ class at school that rides the bus to the other school every day to conduct Lord of the Flies pre-K activities), he could get a backpack like Kieran and Anneke. He will be an Explorer on January 3rd, the day he returns from break.

He (a) wants to know where his Batman backpack is (he had not expressed until just now that he wants TWO backpacks), and (b) doesn’t like the SpiderMan one. He has now thrown the backpack across the room, complained about not being able to OPEN it, and is looking at it all teary, saying, “That’s NOT my present.”

I will keep you updated as the fun develops. It is a party up in here.

Things For Which I Am Thankful

• My house
• My children
• My best friend, Bradley Gene
• The Deerhunter song I can’t get out of my head
• Brad’s mad downloading skills
• Chocolate
• Good friends
• Close extended family
• Not traveling to Dallas this year for Thanksgiving
• Celebrating holidays in my own house
• End of work travel for the semester
• Changes at work
• Job interviews
• Footie pajamas
• Heat, air conditioning
• The cold front that came in Thursday
• My kids’ great school
• My neighborhood
• Austin
• My van
• Routines
• Cub Scouts and The Art School
• Catching up on laundry
• The big three putting the Christmas tree up themselves tonight
• Psychoactive medications
• Watching TV series on the laptop every night
• Parking in the garage
• My bed
• Food
• Music
• Babysitters, especially when they’re related to me
• Alamo Drafthouse
• Mah phone
• iPhone games (Zombie Farm, Words with Friends, Moxie, etc.)
• Reddit
• Reading my favorite blogs – The Creamery, Diagnosis: Urine, Hyperbole and a Half, Matt Logelin, Sam’s Stories, Swistle, Tater Twins, to name a few

Now. You want to see something cute?

This was Archie last year.

Look at that little cue ball!

And this is my cousin’s baby, Chandler, wearing Archie’s hand-me-down.

If I had the requisite graphic design skills, I would *so* do one of those People Magazine spreads, “Who wore it better?”

I’m here to post the first Golden Minion Box of Awesomeness contest post*, but I’m having a difficult time getting past something I just read. Something I so disagree with, it’s making the top of my head feel fuzzy (happens when I get really, really, REALLY upset). And it’s not that I just disagree with it; it’s that I think it’s DAMAGING. Ugh. I can usually ignore things like this; I don’t enjoy getting this angry.

It reminds me, to a much reduced extent, of a conversation my mom told me about this weekend, a conversation she had recently with a co-worker, a mother of four:

Mom: “So, what are the kids doing for Halloween?”
Co-Worker: “We don’t celebrate Halloween… We go to CHURCH.”

I don’t think this was really a distinction when I was little. Like, SOME people celebrate Halloween, and OTHER people go to church. As if the people who celebrate Halloween do NOT go to church and/or worship Satan. A Venn diagram with no areas of overlap.

I just don’t understand this. It’s not like Halloween is a religious (or anti-religious) holiday. It’s not even like it’s a real holiday. I can understand not wanting to get involved in the inherent consumerism/materialism/candyism. But that’s not about God. Is it? I mean, unless we’re talking false idols or something. But then I’d make the argument that there are way more pervasive idols that don’t inspire this same level of concern.

I went to a Presbyterian church growing up. And I celebrated Halloween. My church youth group even put on a haunted house as a fundraiser one year. I volunteered a lot of time setting up and working it. It was FUN, and the money went to send kids (us) to a Christian summer camp.

So, what’s the deal? What am I not understanding? Why do some people NOT do Halloween now? And how is that related to God and church? Is it as simplistic as Halloween = sinister? What do you do for Halloween, if anything?

***

This is how the GMBOA will go down.

Each day this week, starting today, I’ll ask some sort of question. You can respond with as many comments as you like. Starting tomorrow, I’ll announce my favorite response from the previous day (and possibly a runner up, depending on my MOOD).

Next Saturday, the 16th, I’ll randomly select a winner for the GMBOA (and possibly a runner up, depending on my MOOD) from my favorites this week.

Remember: Per GMBOA guidelines, this contest is open only to Minions of The Creamery. For instructions on becoming a Minion, check this.

* For more information on the Golden Minion Box of Awesomeness (GMBOA), I would start here or here.