Our First Christmas

Today is the day after Christmas and it also marks exactly 8 months since Brittany and I were married.

I have a theory that time goes by faster as you get older because: When you are 5 years old 1 year is 20% of your life. When you are 25 years old 1 year is only 4% of your life. And the older you get 1 year is much less of your life than it was when you started.

Anyways, Brittany and I have been working at the Hyatt Regency Hotel for over a year now. Between school schedules and also me working at churches we rarely have had days off together since our honeymoon in April. I mean, literally we have probably had about 9 days off together since then and that is only at the Hyatt. Usually if I get a Thursday off she is at school for half the day and then studying in the evening. You see what I am getting at. We don't have normal weekends. We aren't guaranteed a day to relax together every week. Our time is precious.

Not long after becoming husband and wife we understood that certain boundaries would have to be made in relation to the time spent with our families on holidays and all that jazz. For instance we worked on Thanksgiving and were expecting to possibly have to work on Christmas day. But we did tell our immediate family members that on Christmas day we would not be seeing them and in fact our phones would be turned off.

Please understand that we have and still are spending the rest of this week making sure that everyone gets quality time spent with us to celebrate Christmas. And by celebrating I don't mean exchanging gifts, but just being together for even just an hour or so.

So this Christmas we slept in until around 10am. It felt great. No alarms. No people. Just each other. We woke up and went straight to the 4 foot Christmas tree and exchanged presents. We each got three for each other. We did quite well with the gifts I might add.

We made cinnamon rolls w/ icing for breakfast and we went back to bed and watched It's A Wonderful Life.

After that we got cleaned up and went to the movies to use some gift cards that we had received. After some discussion on what we should see we easily agreed on "Yes Man" with Jim Carrey. The movie theater is PACKED on Christmas day! The movie was pretty good and free.

When we left there we were hungry, but realized that nothing American would be open. So we headed towards Xing Xing, the sushi/japanese/chinese/ place a block away from our apt. I knew it would be open due to the fact that at the end of "A Christmas Story" the only place open for a meal was the Jap place....fa ra ra ra ra.....

We noticed Blockbuster and also The Pit sports grill was open. We went to the Pit and met some nice people, had a couple beers and watched the third quarter of the Lakers vs. Celtics. We stopped in and rented a couple of movies and headed home.

Ended the evening watching Hancock.

This is more a posting for me to jot down what happened today and soak it all in one more time before we wake up tomorrow and turn our phones back on and head back to work.

We decided to spend Christmas together by ourselves not because we don't like our families, but because we like each other more and needed to. Most Christmases I drive around all day stopping in here and there to make sure I have hit all the houses I need to so that nobody's feelings are hurt. I usually find myself feeling incredibly lonely and tired at the end of those days.

Not today.

It was the best Christmas I have had in many years and I feel satisfied that this was the best way I could have spent my first Christmas with my wife.