Ah, the holidays. A special time for family, for getting together, for shared memories and laughter, good food and good times. But, most importantly, for new toys!

Sabreland was a happy place this holiday season, with new gizmos and gadgets aplenty. Yours truly donned a red hat and passed around pressies for all to enjoy. Everyone enjoyed their new toys, and even each others new toys.

Video games, new gaming systems, musicians toys, you name it. But the most fun for the day (besides my brand spankin’ new Kitchen Aide Artisan - oh the domestic goddess weeps with joy over that) was the ever so spiffy Homosapien V2 that Santa brought Tetris.

Who cannot be completely enamored with a toy that, when presented with its own toy, responds with glee? “Is that my ball?! Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” Of course, we’ll just glaze over the part where he tells my beloved Sasha (Robopet, in pink, of course) to pee on the carpet, and then responds with “Who taught you that?!” It’s actually very cute and I hope to get it on video to share soon.

As usual, there was too much food, and far too many hours spent in the kitchen for the ten minutes at the table my heathens allowed for before running back to their rooms to commune with technology once again.

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday! Next up, New Year’s Eve! Let there be much joy and laughter, with good friends and loved ones!

As a bare-footed, tree hugging, Goddess worshiper I get asked frequently this time of year why I even bother with the whole Christmas thing, seeing as I’m not Christian and I’m not looking for redemption. I could bore you with a lot of ancient history, and point you to a million sources of information on ye olde internets, but I’m pretty sure you can find it yourself if you are interested. What follows is the condensed version.

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I haven’t posted since my post Christmas bitching, and I didn’t respond to the last comment left (no, Maven, I don’t think you are a bad person at all, I just found my buttons being pushed that day in a big way…) because we’ve been celebrating our holiday finally.

Mr. Knowitall, my oldest, came home with Cricket and Gothboy for a couple of weeks and I’ve been spending as much time with him as both of our psyches can allow. It has been, if nothing else, extremely emotionally draining on both of us.

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No, not me. Okay, I’m bitching… but I’m bitching about other people bitching. About, of all things, the crappy and lousy gifts they got for Christmas.

Me, I don’t celebrate Christmas, what with me not being, you know, Christian. But I do celebrate Yule, or something, and it does involve exchanging of gifts, a tree, decorations and all the things that have been used for winter celebrations for thousands of years before the Christians decided to smother pagan beliefs by swallowing their festivals. No, I’m not going to talk to you about the “War on Christmas”(tm), but just go ahead and guess how I feel…

Anyway… as I was saying before I derailed myself… I don’t always have a ton of money, and I hardly ever have a ton of time. But I try like hell to get gifts that I know will be appreciated. I’m not always on target. And oddly enough, this same thing happens to others all over the place. We try. Maybe some of us don’t try as hard as others, and maybe some of us spend so much time living on Mars that we don’t really get what’s happening here, but we all try. And there isn’t a one of us who can say we hit the target with each gift each and every time.

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November 11, 1918… The Germans signed the Armistice and thus began the cease fire of the first World War. The following year, Woodrow Wilson issued an Armistice Day proclamation.

… “To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nation.”

In 1938, Congress passed a bill stating that each November 11 Armistice Day would be celebrated. Eventually this morphed into Veteran’s Day, a name change being made official in 1958. No longer a day just to celebrate the truce of WWI, but a day to honor all American veterans.

To those who have served, thank you.

To those still far from home, you are not far from our hearts and thoughts and we pray for your safe return.