What's in YOUR purse?

Today I had a mini freak out because I couldn't find my car keys. I have them on a lanyard along with my work keys, whistle, and badge and even with this "easy to find" combinatoin it was nowhere to be found. At first I thought I locked it in my purse which was in the locked car that started this whole adventure. However, by randomly coming upon a spare key I forgot existed, I unlocked the car, got said purse, and discovered my keys were not the purse at all.

What WAS in my purse you ask. I will tell you:

62 cents in change
3 plastic sporks
1 plastic spoon
1/2 a stick of gum
1 crumpled post-it that said "dont forget" with the second half missing
3 seperate glittery nail files
1 spare key to a car I no longer own
5 pieces of random christmas ribbons
2 cherry hershey kisses
4 tea bags
1 button with a photo of an ugly Christmas sweater on it
and 1 roll of scotch tape.

I think I have some issues I may need to look into. I am *not* a purse girl normally, although thats been changing slowly. I love to collect purses, it just seems a hassle to carry them with me a lot (hence locking it in the car and forgetting about it). I would expect very few of these items to be in a normal person's purse and would expect chapsticks, makeup, real money, a wallet, etc in a regular purse. I carry plastic utensils and tape apparantly. Always be prepared?

4th Annual Sibling Christmas Eve Eve Party

Vince and I in hooded footie pajamas. I am the Stay Puft Marshmallow man and he is Mickey Mouse.

 It was hard when we were first married to figure out a way to combine our family Christmas traditions. I grew up having a big fancy Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve night and opening presents as a family after, on Christmas morning we would go see what Santa brought us -usually our biggest best present- and we would have leftover fried ham and Christmas cookies for breakfast. Vincent's family opens their presents on Christmas morning and receive holiday pajamas from their mom on Christmas Eve. We went more with Vince's parent's traditions since we were local to them and my parents were in another state and decided to just always do Christmas by visiting my sister every year. 

Because of the above and my need for traditions I started our own new tradition (which is hard to do when you don't have children of your own to get excited about Christmas for you.) I host an annual sibling Christmas Eve-Eve party with white elephant gift exchange for my husband and his siblings. I am just an honorary sibling since I'm an in-law and my own sibling/family do their own thing without us. The first year we were going to watch Muppet Christmas Carol but somehow it lost the vote to Muppet Treasure Island and an odd sing-along tradition was born.

Vince was overjoyed at getting wooden puzzle brain teasers.

As the years pass its harder for all siblings to get together. This year a spouse was added and she as well as James had to work late. However, we were all together for at least 20 minutes. This years White Elephant included a set of Chuck Norris joke books, a bag of ball pit balls, mustache coasters, a handheld skiball game, wooden brainteaser puzzles, and a gag box that looked liked a chest hair shaving design kit but was a Mario goomba hat. Last years best gift was a tie between a singing Justin Beiber toothbrush and a set of suicidal sea monkeys.    

Somehow another odd tradition came to be. Katie shaving James' head and us playing pictionary on it.

Inside the Gag box was this Mario Goomba hat.

The Gag box made Katie believe she received a chest hair shaver/design kit.

Reflective Christmas Thoughts

Don we now our Christmas apparel... falala lalala la la laaaaaa

Poor neglected blog.
Maybe I'll update more in 2013. No promises.

We've been pretty busy around here for the holidays. I had to send my packages out late, sorry family. Well, except for my Grandpa, whose present I bought online and almost spent more on 1-day shipping than the actual gift iteself. Yipes! Luckily, our cards went out nice and on time. I can't take credit for that- I did the lazy girl thing and had the company who printed them send them out with postage for me. I didn't have to address, seal, or stamp a thing. Merry Christmas to me!

This Christmas I decided to take a large portion of my gift budgets and put it towards giving kids in need a good Christmas. This wasn't a charity that helps children, this was my own project I took on to help children who I see regularly and know personally. I see their faces and I know their stories that range from hunger, loss, neglect, and having no place to call home. Most don't have gloves, socks, etc for winter. What really kills me is how few of them have an actual book (let alone bookS) at home. I changed all that for them this Christmas. By not buying gifts for friends and cutting waaay back on family gifts I was able to provide fun Christmas gift bags to twenty-eight children aged 5-6. The gift bags were beautiful and I made sure they had the proper big bows and tissue paper- that alone made their little eyes go WIDE with excitement.

Each bag contained 6 books, a pair of extra soft gloves, a hat, a scarf, a wooden ornament to decorate, a holiday themed wooden mask-on-a-stick to decorate and color, a big box of crayons, coloring paper, pencils, writing paper, socks, and a pack of tissues. I couldn't do this all alone. A complete stranger heard about what I was doing from my mom and donated to my cause. A couple who is very dear to my husband and I also made a very generous donation to this project. There are AMAZING people in this world, and I am humbled by the help I received to give these children a good Christmas.

Apart from this I was able to see Toys for Tots in action this year. You may have seen the bins for donations, you may have even donated yourself, but how many of you have actually SEEN the children receiving the toys? It made me think, "28 years of life and for the first time I'm REALLY seeing Christmas".  Next year I hope we are in a situation to help even more. However, I don't want this to be a Chrismas thing, I want to help always.