The Ghost of Christmas Present

I wrote yesterday's post as I was finishing up the last of the ordered items for the fundraiser...sorry to dampen any one's Christmas spirits...I was reading Busy Bees posts with Christmas pictures of her and her brother when I realized that I only have a few Christmas photos of me as a kid...and I think one has those Avon perfume animals....I must go through the box of old photos and scan it for LMNOP! But seriously, if we can't learn from the shit that happens to us then we will just keep repeating what we would like to change. So as soon as I left home for good, I was determined to make Christmas special...for me...and that led to making it brighter for everyone else too. There wasn't a lot of money when my own kids were small...but they had a stocking full of surprises and Santa always brought something....even when they were too big to believe.

I intended to go back and repost a story of one of my favorite Christmases...and unfortunately I cannot find it...due to the incident, all my posts are in the archives and because they are there I cannot search for them using a single word and I have too many December posts to read each one.......so I will recap that Christmas in 2002.....Daughter #1 was discharged from the hospital after another stay. Her counts bottomed out and she was in home bound until they climbed past the magic number of 800. Finally, 2 days before Christmas her counts topped 800+ and we headed to the mall....there was nothing under our Christmas tree except a pair of fleece Old navy pants a co-worker had purchased for me to give my son earlier in the week....that was the extent of shopping!

All 5 of us took turns pushing Daughter #1 in the wheel chair...passing her along to who she did not have to buy a present for while we took our presents to the cash registers without the person we were buying for to see. There was nothing left in the sizes or colors we wanted and we held up stupid things and joked about who was getting them. We pushed that wheel chair through the crowds gathering lots of stares at our collective bald heads...we had so much fun just being together after being separated by stupid cancer for the past 3 1/2 months.

We got home, wrapped and wrapped and wrapped and we were too tired to move. It was pizza for dinner and we tried not to fall asleep while we watched a Christmas Story- ("You'll shoot your eye out!") There's more to that story in the missing post...but in a shot glass you get the picture.

May your Christmas be filled with good memories for years to come :)
*I was able to find the Christmas post from 2007, 5 years after...it is in the post below.

*LIVESTRONG*LOVESTRONGER*LAUGH HARDER*HAVE A JOLLY CHRISTMAS AND MAKE IT BRIGHT ENOUGH TO LAST ALL YEAR*