this little piggy went home

ah, fallbrook. you just gotta love the sleepy quality of your quaint home town. there are no bright lights obstructing the starry sky at night. there are no loud garbage trucks outside your window waking you up at 7am. just lots of peace and quiet. and the older i get, the more i appreciate coming home to the "friendly village" (yes, that is what the welcome sign says).

in my older years, christmas has never been my favorite holiday. it's just a lot of unwarranted stress and consumerism and it's always sort of turned me off. and the split family thing was always a bit of a pain in the butt (from early years on). having christmas morning at one house and christmas dinner at the other (and most often some little argument was involved). granted, being an only child, i cleaned up on the presents, but there was always a strange feeling that christmas gave me. not the warm and cherry feelings they show in the TV xmas movies. more of an unsettled uneasiness.

and this year, with my dad being gone, was no exception. people always say the holidays are the hardest when you've lost a family member. and yes, it was strange not to have my dad around. but it was different this year too. instead of being separate, the families sort of melded. sort of. my mom and i went to my step mom's house for a lovely christmas eve dinner. and on xmas day, my grandma (dad's mom) joined my mom's family for dinner. so this was a new kind of mixed up christmas. and i think because of the newness of the situation, my dad's absence wasn't a total shock. either that, or it's just my defense mechanism which automatically turns off my emotions when i come home. i think i don't want to get sad so badly, that i can just shut it out of my brain. strange, huh?

i will admit that i was pretty excited for some of the gifts i received. the theme this year was all about keeping busy indoors. for my NY winter hibernation. i got the silk screening machine i was hoping for, the LOTR trilogy extended version box set, a nice pair of pj's and slippers, and tons of rad books!

my grandma decided to give me a pile of letters she'd been saving for years. they were all the letters my dad had written her when he was in the army and in viet nam. i got up early this morning, read through some of them and found a little envelope of photos of him. the images and his writing brought it all back and made me cry. obviously when the defenses are down and the memories come back, i do miss him an awful lot but he's definitely here in spirit.