Christmas gifts you can't buy

 A few posts ago, I was mentioning my propensity for wanting things to go according to "my plan".  Well, yesterday was headed in just that direction.  I was going to have my Saturday Christmas parties with Kindermusik, then head home and do a bunch of Christmas shopping with my daughter in the afternoon, who had a day off from dance classes.  But when I came home, I discovered that my husband and daughter had gone to the mall for their own date.  Guess I forgot to fill everyone else in on my direction for the day.

So there I was with a whole afternoon - and not a plan in sight.  My first thought was to spend the time doing some clean-up...but that thought quickly went away (smile).  Who wants to spend newly found free time doing housework?  While I was eating some left-overs for lunch, I remembered my 19 year old son with his nose in the books, preparing for finals in a week.  Hmmmm....I remembered being in university and needing some study breaks.....so I went downstairs and asked him if he wanted to walk the dog with me.    And so began a wonderful afternoon with my first-born.

We put on our boots/shoes and scarves (OK, I put on a scarf, he didn't), jackets and gloves and walked in the snow.  We talked about university, we talked about daily stuff and ordinary life.  As we were nearing the house, I said that it had been ages since we had played "Scrabble" together - and he was up for it.  So I made some hot drinks and we spent a while playing our game.  No one else in the family plays "Scrabble" with me, but Evan likes to.  Funny thing is, we don't even keep score.  We just like seeing what words we can make.

After that we finished decorating the Christmas tree downstairs that had been sitting half decorated since last weekend.  The upstairs one had been done, but the boxes were still everywhere downstairs, and the tree looked sadly neglected.  So we hung the last few decorations and talked about the ornament collections.

Saturday, the 11th will go down as one of my favourite days of Christmas this year.  A day I had thought I would spend looking in the mall for gifts for others turned out to be one of the best gifts of all for me.