The house Santa Claus forgot

This morning, Christmas morning, is a sad morning for the munchkins. For years the kids would always be up awaiting my arrival in the living room so that they can begin to open their presents. This year, since there is nothing under the tree from Santa Claus they are both asleep in their beds. The kids do not believe in Santa Claus however we do have a tree and lights and we always pretend that the gifts are from Santa even if they know it is not real. I guess that there is something magical about getting up on Christmas morning and being greeted by all of the pretty presents under the tree. It is sort of like going to church, you expect for the singers to be singing and the preacher to be preaching. Without those things the experience just would not be the same. On Friday night I got together with a friend of mine and shared pizza and Dr Pepper. I told my friend that usually what we do the payday before Christmas is that we say to heck with the bills and we just go to Walmart and buy the childrens Christmas presents and then just suffer the consequences of not having paid specific bills after the holidays. This year the bills were much more plentiful than the funds we had to pay them. Nevertheless we were out of character this year and spent our money on bills and not on Christmas presents. I guess what makes this even worse is that for the last five years our kids have been sponsored by Happy Days and Special Times and Food Lion for Christmas. Therefore our kids really had a nice Christmas each year after Jessica died. This is the first year since Jessica has died that we were supposed to provide Christmas presents for the kids. Luckily for me my 13 year old daughter is taking things in stride while my 10 year old son is not real thrilled about this. I spoke to him about the reality of things and why this year presnets are real sparse. He understands the why but he is still bummed out and I guess I can understand. While I was writing this Katy and the kids got ready to go to Walmart. Apparently Walmart is open today and the kids want to go spend the Christmas money they found in their stockings so they were pretty excited about that. Maybe Christmas wont be a total disaster for the kids after all..