Christmas Eve

We woke today to some very dense fog. I knew it was coming because my phone buzzed at 3:30 AM when the weather service decided to let us know. I probably should have ignored it but when the phone buzzes, it is hard to let it be.

I do appreciate the weather updates but I’m not sure why they can’t grade them on a better scale. Look, if a tornado is approaching my house at 3:30 in the morning, I’d certainly want to know. But I don’t really need to know that it is going to be foggy when I wake up. I mean I do have eyes and it is hard to miss.

Normally, I might have slept through it but I’ve developed these weird sleep habits. It is like the night is divided into two parts. I wake up some time in really early morning and kind of have to get up and do something for a bit before being able to fall back to sleep. Or maybe I’ve just trained myself to do this without knowing. In any event, I was kind of awake when the phone buzzed.

I’ve said before how much I love fog. It is so mysterious and makes the world look so different. Takes all the sharp edges off and kind of hides everything behind a veil. Funny thing about walking in the fog is that it is like you have a little bubble that moves with you because it is always clear around you and foggy everywhere else. So if you try to walk into a fog bank, it kind of disappears. I always like to imagine fog as a portal and if you could walk into a bank, you’d appear somewhere else. But that’s just the INFP side of me coming out.

Sometimes I like to imagine what it would be like to live in a scene like the one above. It feels like life would be slower and maybe people wouldn’t be as concerned with running around doing last minute shopping or whatever else stresses people out a this time of year. Then, I just realize it would be cold.

You know the song with the line “there’s no place like home for the holidays”? Kind of talks about people going back to someplace to gather with the family. That seems rather common but, at some point, that line either stops being true or the definition of home changes. We did the “Christmas at home” thing for many years even though my parents had moved out of the house we grew up in and it was kind of a tight fit so some of us ended up staying in hotels.

But as my parents got older and my brothers had kids, that stopped happening. The last Christmas we went to my parents, it was just me, my wife and my sister. It was kind of clear that my Dad wasn’t that into it. The tree was tucked away in a corner of their downstairs so you really couldn’t gather by it to hand out presents. And we heard stories from him about how hard it was for the two of them to get the house ready. So we just stopped doing it.

That’s just the way it goes as you get older. At some point (like my brothers), you have family of your own and you want to start creating memories for your kids so you don’t travel as much. If I’m going to be honest, I’ve become kind of a home body in my older age. I enjoy sitting here and realizing that I don’t have to get in the car and drive somewhere. I can just sit around and listen to Christmas music while the lights on the tree cycle through their patterns.

That’s probably why it is easy to get nostalgic and maybe a little depressed around Christmas. As a kid, Christmas is certainly magical with all the gifts under the tree that tempt you but can’t be opened. (My parents would always hold back stocking presents and at least one Santa present so that it would look like he had shown up during the night). At least until we were old enough to not believe and then Mom would just fill up the stockings before she went to bed.

Well I’m probably boring you with all this. We will have a quiet Christmas – just the two of us (three if you count Rocco the wonder dog). He’ll want a walk because Christmas is just like any other day and every day is a good day for a walk. He doesn’t quite like the whole opening of gifts so he tends to stay far away from that. No, we don’t have anything for him. He has enough cookies from other sources that he doesn’t need anything else.

I had to buy myself an early Christmas gift. My fitbit finally died.

Not the actual one but just an idea of the model I had. See I’m not one to trade up for the latest and greatest just because it is new and shiny. I mean this one was still functional so why change? Besides, I like that I could just stick it in my pocket and not worry about it. But, like all technology, it is now a product of the dark ages and must be replaced by something bigger and better that does more stuff. Because more is better.

I suppose it might have been possible to find an old model but some simple searches turned up nothing. So I had to go with one of the new fangled ones that looks like a watch. I used to wear a watch but I stopped many years ago and I got used to the feeling of freedom on my wrists. Strapping it on didn’t feel the best so I took it off the band and put it in my pocket. It won’t track my heart rate from there but if I’m just walking around, I don’t need it to. Again, more features is not always a good thing. They offered two bands but both are just cheap plastic. I mean I’m not the most stylish guy in the world but even I have standards. Maybe I’ll look online for something that is more in line with my “brand”.

Because my old one died right before Christmas, my wife had already done her shopping so that’s why I ended up just buying it for myself. If it had died earlier, I could have actually asked for a gift and given her a real idea.

Well I’ll wrap this up. If you celebrate Christmas, I hope yours is Merry.