the Best Christmas present ever

This year, I received the best Christmas gift ever – from my husband and myself – the gift of freedom.

Freedom from the stress and frantic rush of cards and gifts.

Now don’t get me wrong. I LOVE to give gifts. I appreciate receiving them but I particularly enjoy giving them, knowing that I made someone’s day. Especially when I’m walking around and I see THE perfect gift for somebody I know. I also love to make photo books and albums for my family.

But this year, instead of enjoying writing Christmas cards and making the photo books, it felt…stressful and hectic. Buying, writing and sending cards is a lot of work in the US…but here, it’s twice as hard. You have to realize how different things are here in Nicaragua. They don’t sell boxes of cards here. They sell them 2 or 3 at a time. So I have to stop by the store every day for weeks in order to get enough cards for everybody on my list. Then the writing. And then I have to make sure I stop by the post office during its few morning hours (there are no such thing as mail boxes and remember, I have to walk all this, since Steve is working and I can’t drive the Jeep (try double parking with no power steering in the city…it’s pretty tough!)). The post office is a good 14 blocks away. All of this was taking a lot of time away from my family…and one of the great themes of Christmas time is spending time with family…how ironic!

If this was the season of love and joy, why was I feeling so harried? Something just didn’t seem right. Instead of enjoying time with my family, I was killing myself trying to buy and send cards, and trying to find time on the internet to make photo books.

It was then that I realized that I had lost touch with what was important, and after talking with Steve, decided to nix the gifts and send out only a few cards to our families. Suddenly, I had all this extra time!

And do you know what I did with it?

I played tag, had dashing sword fights, screaming tickle fights, made gigantic tents and delicious cookies. I had so much fun and I think my boys enjoyed my “presence” as a wonderful present for them as well. So if you’re wondering why you didn’t receive a Christmas card from us…now you know.

We thought of all of you this season, and hope that you, too, were able to enjoy time with your family and friends. Hard to believe that next Christmas we will be celebrating with some of you, drinking hot chocolate and trying to stay warm.