Whether you celebrate this holiest of holidays or are just basking in the return of spring, warmth, blue skies and green leaves, I hope you have a very happy day.

After the Writers & Editors One-on-One conference, followed immediately by BlogHer, I had some major catching up to do in my personal life. And by that, I mean that after being away from home for two weekends in a row, the mess around here had gotten completely out of control.

So imagine my excitement when I was contacted by Bissell last week, letting me know I’d won their BlogHer drawing for a Healthy Home Vacuum, ProHeat 2X® Healthy Home Deep Cleaner, and a $250 SpaFinder.com Gift Certificate.

I am ridiculously excited. Not only have I not used a vacuum that cost more than $75 in, like, ever (and, yes, it shows) but I NEVER win drawings. I was the kid who sat through every church and school raffle choking back a lump in my throat because I never, ever, ever won anything.

But my losing streak is over, baby! Yesterday, FedEx delivered these to my door:

And, of course, a gift certificate for spa goodness.

Now I have some important decisions to make. Vacuum the whole house, then steam clean the carpets all at once? Or go a room at a time?

And then on to the pampering. What do I choose: two massages and a facial, two facials and a massage, a facial-pedi-massage? And where to go in the southwest Michigan area?

I’m going to have fun deciding. Feel free to jump in with suggestions…or just go read some of my latest posts on The Happiest Mom (I promise, they have nothing to do with awards or vacuums).

Okay, so it’s not officially here yet. But Memorial Day weekend always feels like the true beginning of summer to me, especially when it’s as sunny and warm as this one has been so far. We spent yesterday at my brother and sister-in-law’s house, eating, drinking, watching the kids run around, talking and laughing. Laughing a lot.

(my nephew, Jack, and a little friend, Lucy)

My brother John, the musical talent

My niece, Ruby. Don’t you wish you were her in that picture?

What are you up to this weekend?

You may have noticed that I haven’t done a lot of posting here over the last two weeks.

Over the holiday, I practiced the benign neglect…of my life.

Dishes went unwashed (not for an entire two weeks, mind you. In a family of six, the longest we can go is about a day, or people just stop eating or shovel food directly from the container into their mouths like animals). Floors went unswept. Bedtimes were ignored. Alarm clocks were turned off. Wake-up times were, some days, almost grossly late.

My kids ate all their Christmas stocking candy (and then when it was gone, scrounged around for leftover treats), laid around and read, played with their gifts and were basically a bunch of lazy slugs. Often none of us changed out of our pajamas at all until showering sounded like more fun than going any longer without a shower. Once I looked at my 11-year-old son and realized he’d been wearing the same shirt for three days.

We survived on Christmas leftovers, cereal, sandwiches, fruit and the occasional guilt-induced salad or steamed broccoli. We did a little traveling but mostly stayed home. My husband kept stealing my new Crabtree & Evelyn bathrobe, which is so ridiculously soft you feel like you could fall asleep instantly after putting it on. And then he’d fall asleep instantly after putting it on.

I got hardly any e-mail. I sent hardly any e-mail. I turned on my instant messenger, but most days there was nobody on so I didn’t do any chatting. I checked in with Twitter but barely engaged in any conversation. I mulled over a few ideas for new projects but didn’t do much work on any of them.

Of course, we had to make up for our sloth today by paying a little extra attention to restoring the house to its former glory…er, adequacy. And some work had to be done to get the kids ready for returning to school tomorrow (clean underwear and socks suddenly seemed a lot more necessary, and I realized I’d never bothered to see if they had any school notes that needed dealing with over the holiday. And there were the two-weeks-neglected lunchboxes to deal with…)

But basically, none of us accomplished anything for two weeks. And it was glorious.

How was your holiday? If it was as lazy as mine, I hope you’re not wasting your time feeling guilty about it. After all that sluggishness, who has the energy for regret?

I feel like I’ve spent the last few days running around in a blur of freezing temps, wrapping paper and shopping bags. Oh yeah…that’s because I have.

Still, there’s nothing as exciting to me as the lead-up to the Christmas holidays. I simply love everything about this time of year, even when it means braving some less-than-fantastic weather (Umm, really, Chicago? -30? And hey, Southwest Michigan, I know you want to give us a white Christmas and all, but lay off a little, wouldja–I’d like to make it to church and back tomorrow night in one piece.)

Between putting up new posts at my WEtv.com blog and Largerfamilies.com, I haven’t had enough time for many original holiday posts here this year. So I hope you don’t mind if I share one of my favorites from last year. Enjoy!

This week, faced with a last-minute shopping emergency, I took the kids to the mall, a place that, this time of year, I try very hard to avoid. After we made our purchase, I was dodging crowds of holiday shoppers with my brood in tow when they spotted him.

Santa Claus.

I’m not sure if I should be proud or ashamed of this fact, but my kids have never, ever sat on Santa’s lap. Belief in Mr. Claus has always been a much more abstract concept in our home. At least one gift for each child comes directly from The Fat Man himself, evidenced by different wrapping paper and “LOVE, SANTA” scrawled in block printing on the tag.

His milk gets drunk, his cookies get eaten, we read The Night Before Christmas and make the usual comments about how we think we hear Santa’s sleigh coming. Yada, yada, yada.

But I’ve never felt the need to cap the Santa experience by taking my kids to the mall, waiting in line to plop one of them on an actor’s lap, and then paying $9 for a crappy souvenir photo. After all, by the time most kids are five or six they’ve figured out that the real Santa is busy overseeing his midget labor force in December, not going mall to mall asking kids what they want for Christmas. As if he really needs to be told. He is MAGICAL, after all.

What intrigued me, though, was that it was my oldest kids—who by their own admission are no longer believers—who seemed the most interested in a visit with Saint Nick. “Look, Mom, it’s Santa!” Jacob said. “We—I mean William and Owen—should really go tell them what we—I mean they—want for Christmas, don’t you think?”

There’s a big part of me that was heartbroken when my oldest decided he was no longer a believer, and I wanted to indulge the little-kid side of him. Besides, what could it hurt? So the five of us headed over to Santa’s Magical Parent Trap and got in line.

But everything seemed to fall apart once it was our turn. The big boys, who had just a few minutes before seemed excited by the prospect of getting up close and personal with Santa, decided to assume a cool, aloof stance once we got there and refused to come inside the gates at all. Owen took one look at “Santa’s” gray beard—or perhaps it was the belly that jiggled like a bowl full of jelly—and refused to go anywhere near him. “No, mom, no, mom, no!” he cried, clinging to my neck as though I was trying to turn him over to an orphanage. Pointing at Santa, he tearfully declared him “’TUPID!”

I held out hope for William. After all, at just-turned-four, Will’s at prime believer age. To him, there’s nothing at all strange about the idea that Santa could be at thousands of malls at the same time, just like there’s nothing strange about the idea that an overweight man who likes to hang around with elves squeezes down millions of chimneys in one night.

But even William wasn’t going for it. He refused to make eye contact with Santa, instead creeping up to him sideways looking down at the floor. When Santa patted his lap and invited Will to jump on up, Will looked at me with alarm and said “Do I have to?”

“No…but don’t you want to tell Santa what you want for Christmas?” I asked.

“Can you just tell him for me?” he asked, making a hasty retreat.

“He wants a guitar,” I said to Santa, as William backed away, his eyes on the floor.

Santa nodded.

“He’s shy,” I explained, as William hid behind his brothers and Owen let out a fresh shriek. Santa just stared. Really embarrassed now, I turned and fled.

“You want a picture?” the helper “elf” called after me.

But it was too late. The five of us, holiday misfits, were already hurrying toward the mall exit.

Before we left, though, we spent the nine bucks we’d saved on a round of Aunt Annie’s pretzels.

Every year, the boys and I make a trip to the store, where each child gets to pick out one ornament to put on the tree. The intention is that one day we will actually remember whose ornaments are whose, and they will have a small supply to take off to college or their first apartment or wherever life takes them. And of course, in the meanwhile we get a pretty tree that’s full of character but growing more crowded by the year.

On these shopping ventures it can be hard to stay on task: just get one ornament per person, then head for the checkout aisle. I see SHINY stuff everywhere and suddenly I find myself creating a need for those tree lights shaped like the ones from the 30s or that new beaded runner for the table. And of course, I don’t always manage to quell the urge. Our Advent calendar was a fairly recent impulse purchase (though I’d been wanting to buy a nice one for years). A few years ago I really needed new gold balls to replace all the ones that were pulled off the tree and broke when I had toddlers in the house. And I always find myself looking at new tablecloths and candles.

But when I was surveying the house yesterday photographing my holiday decorations, I was struck by just how many of those things have been constant from year to year. I’ve had my Mary/Jesus statue and wooden creche for at least 11 years, maybe longer (that’s nearly my whole adult life). I have a little wire tree that I hang these little antiquey ornaments on. I remember finding the ornaments in a little gift shop here in town–years before I lived here!–and loving them. That was at least five years ago. There’s a tin that my Aunt Kay gave me when I was maybe 9 or 10 years old. (it came with a puzzle inside; the puzzle did not survive my childhood, but the tin did). The Santa with his reindeer was a gift from Jon’s aunt the year we got married. Many of the ornaments on the tree date back 10-15 years, some longer.

And I realize that the things I get the most satisfaction from are the ones that have been around the longest, that I pull out year after year. I absolutely love taking out my creche and setting up my little wire “tree” and seeing my old friends emerge from the tissue paper. I even love putting it all away when Christmas is over, wrapping each item carefully and looking forward to seeing them all again. To me, one of the coziest parts of Christmas is seeing the same, familiar old decorations around the house and knowing that no matter how much things change, our Christmas decor looks pretty much the same year after year.

I still enjoy and want to continue the tradition of buying one new ornament a year for each child, but when I really think about it, I get by far the most enjoyment from the things that have been constant from year to year. They may fall out of fashion or chip, come unglued or lose pieces, but I still plan on hauling them out year after year. When it comes to holiday decorations, I just really love my old stuff.

And that’s a good thing to keep in mind when I’m looking for an excuse to stay away from yet another display of new holiday tablecloths and runners.

I rarely do picture posts because I am still working on acquiring 1) skill and 2) a fabulous camera, but as Christmas is one of my favorite times of year and decorating for Christmas is one of my very favorite things to do, I thought I’d share a little glimpse of our house…

This year, we decided to go a little more modest than we have with trees in the past. Due to the current economic climate? A little of that…and the fact that we live in a house with a much smaller living room now! The tree is in our little sunroom off of the main room, with a view of the channel emptying into the lake behind it. By the way, this was perhaps the pokiest-needled tree I’ve decorated in the last decade. Ouch!

From left to right: the Mary & baby Jesus my mother gave Jon and I for our first Christmas together, our Advent calendar (we got it out of storage a week late so haven’t actually been able to open up that first week’s worth of doors!), and a very cool wooden puzzle-style creche my mother gave me, and which remains among my favorite Christmas decorations. I’d love to leave it out year-round, I enjoy it that much! But some things are more special when you only use them once in a while…

Also propped up against the Advent calendar are two little angels the boys made in school last year. I thought they were too cute not to put out.

Having no fireplace, the stockings were instead hung on the non-functional woodstove with care…

In hopes that Saint Nicholas soon would be there. In his sleigh, or a car, or hanging from a rope, or whatever.

Now where are those Wise Men, Joseph and Mary? And where’s Jesus, for goodness’s sake? Even an oxen lowing would give this empty stable some life. I went through all the Christmas boxes, and all I could find was this paper Jesus that Will made in preschool, and from this angle it looks like a piece of toilet paper. Guess I gotta get to the gift store stat.

and…

just because it’s funny, look at the picture below–a little above the stable to see the part of the picture I cropped out.

That belly is always getting in the way these days and showing up where I least expect it!