CHRISTMAS!

I love Christmas. I love the holiday, I love the lights, I love the tree, I love watching South Texas try to be cold for Christmas (It didn't make it this year. It's about seventy degrees F outside. Most years its 40 with a steady drizzle so seventy and sunshine are much better) I love how QUIET it is. Oh my GOD does it get quiet for Christmas.

And then there is the accounting of things. Because the best part of Christmas is definately family, the second best is glitter (I include twinkly lights as glitter), but the third best is that on Christmas people give you stuff.

I'd say there were three stand-out highlights. The one thing I asked for this year were a pair of real headphones. I am a music addict, and earbuds just don't do it for me anymore. I got them. YAY!

My brother gave me the motion-capture/wii remote knockoff deal for my PS3. I am a somewhat casual gamer (MINECRAFT! JOURNEY! OMG if you game, and you can find it for your system, GET JOURNEY) so it's a lot of fun. It will also kill your arm and give you tennis elbow in record time. Also, it let me get my mother the dancing game she's wanted for Christmas. It made her happy, too. :D

But my fav this year came from my stepfather.

I am kind of a nail polish addict. Okay, it's not EVERY kind of polish. But I love glitter. No. I LOVE glitter. And there is nothing quite as much fun as a big, spangly holographic glitterbomb. Sadly, companies do not frequently make big, spangly holographic glitterbombs, and I am both too lazy and too cheap to buy the indies, so I make my own. (...It makes sense in my head.). This means there is a table in my garage with a bottle of glitter medium and enough glitter to become a health hazard. My stepfather, who doesn't know me very well yet, decided that it was nail polish in general that I liked, and gave me a set of nail art stamp plates.

Which I had just begun lusting over. As in I had just spent most of Christmas eve looking at stamp plates and drooling, and then looking at my bank account and making a sad whimpering noise. So I. Freaked. Out. And then tried them out immediately. Ready to visit Planet Girl?

 And just because I feel like showing off, and I FINALLY had my camera close at hand, here's the glittery things I mixed my own self:

This is the one I'm wearing in the picture, on top of a glittery gold-purple base thing you can kind of see down near the nail bed.

This one is pure self indulgance

Yes. They're both in brand name bottles. I usually use half of the glitter medium (WHICH IS EXPENSIVE AS FUCK) and half of a brand-name clear polish, which has the added benefit of giving me another polish bottle to work with. I'm not ENTIRELY happy with that gold mix, and I plan on hitting Wal-mart for a bunch of dollar top-coats as soon as Christmas stops being here so I can get the recipe down. That silver-blue spangle mix is perfect. I even have it written down *somewhere*.

Other members of my family had lots of fun. My brother got a buck-knife, and immediately said "That's not a knife" in a Crocodile Dundee accent. My mother got a MASSIVE set of hand-tuned wind chimes. They resonate for about a minute after you hit them. It's like a tape of meditation music all the time, now. I don't know my stepfather that well yet, either, so I gave him what he asked for (Magic 8-ball) and something I figured he'd like (WWE DVD. Because he is *that* into wrestling)

And then he told me he hadn't gotten anything for Christmas for 5+ years, and we both kind of cried.

I have yet to do Christmas with my Dad and stepmother, so unless he can come down to this part of town (it's an hour long drive) we may wind up holding off until after New Year's.

Speaking of New Year's, if you don't hear from me after the first, it will be because the customers at my workplace ate me. It's going to be that hectic.

So now the question is...what holiday did YOU celebrate this month, and how much fun did you have in the process?