a very meyers christmas.

christmas of 2014 could go down as "the christmas that tried really, really hard but kind of fizzled out", "the christmas that james beat everyone at gifts", or maybe even "the christmas that involved a lot of crying but turned out ok in the end". 

but i think the official title for this year is "the christmas of which we have almost zero pictures". 

see, not only did james work a lot this week (which has not only never happened since he's had this job but also included a million hour day on christmas eve), we also spent our entire christmas holiday dying of the bubonic plague (ok slight exaggeration). so, heres a shot from our christmas card session that you can pretend is a picture of us during christmas festivities:

the irony of this all is that, earlier this year, james decided it would be a good idea to majorly scale back our usual christmas-related obligations and endeavors. you know, so that we could finally take some time to have "our" christmas, and to make things less stressful and easier on his severely introverted wife that typically spends christmas time having nervous breakdowns and panic attacks. obviously being the primary beneficiary of this decision (and having finals totally wreck the christmas spirit for me), i wholeheartedly agreed and we went about our merry way. 

not that christmas was by any means cancelled, i mean, we obviously did gifts and a tree since this was the first christmas EVER that weve had any money for christmas type things, and participated in most of the things we were invited to, we just... kind of ignored christmas until two weeks prior, didnt bother pulling out any decorations, didnt bring anything homemade to any parties, and opted out of christmas eve in san diego. 

at first, the decrease in pressure and expectations was awesome as we lazily prepared for a totally chill holiday. james has been warned that work would be slammed the week before/week of christmas, but it turns out he was home for the entirety of last week and not only helped me with alice/chores/christmassy things, he also took care of a bunch of things that were wrong with my car. everything was pretty awesome. 

until we all got sick. not just slightly sick, like, a really icky cold/flu thing thats still kind of lingering despite my best efforts (yes, by that i mean a combination of essential oils AND normal medicine). all three of us. and in a cruel twist of fate of course i got hit worst/last. meaning, every single christmas prep thing i had been procrastinating on (and by that i mean, all of them) while being unable to breathe/stand for more than 10 minutes without feeling like i was going to pass out. for some reason i thought it was a GREAT idea to go run the last christmas errands in this state by myself resulting in such gems as loosing the bag with all of alices stocking stuffers at target and almost crying in ralphs because they didnt have the gluten free cinnamon rolls that im pretty sure i havent seen at any other store than ralphs. 

then james had to work on christmas eve. now, in all fairness, we had been warned that this would probably happen. and we did plan on not going to san diego just in case this issue actually did arise. but we didnt actually think it was going to happen, let alone with a million hour day at a really far away job. so christmas eve not only involved making food and wrapping gifts (actually, also making one of my cousins gifts right before we left) and getting alice over to my aunts house for dinner while being barely alive, it involved doing all of those things alone. which in all honesty was incredibly difficult but totally worth it. christmas eve dinner was great. christmas eve crying because i realized alices stocking stuff was missing and jamess christmas gift had STILL not arrived (curse you two-day shipping from sephora that actually takes four days!) was not so great. 

but eventually i composed myself, eschewing stockings in favor of just taping some candy on alices other presents, and jamess gift miraculously arrived somewhere just before 10pm. everybody went to sleep at a mostly decent hour and christmas day was just as awesomely lazy as we had originally hoped. 

we slept in, opened presents, ate pancakes, put on some dr who, and i went back to sleep until about noon. then my mom and sister started asking when we were coming over, and i had to um... make my sisters entire gift and wrap everything else up before we went to my moms for more presents, prime rib dinner, and the dr who christmas special (ok, that was just for me, james, and my brother, but still). sickness aside, it was everything i could have asked for in a christmas. 

especially the part where james got me a beautiful new desk and for the first time EVER i have a functional place to write, sew, AND draw!!! this was a total surprise, because 1. james had already gotten me the new food processor i asked for as an "early" gift, and 2. i didnt even ask for a new desk, he thought of that all on his own. and nailed it. 

was this the best, brightest, most impressive, photogenic christmas ever? no. but was it a perfectly delightful, very, very meyers christmas? yes, yes it was. 

what did your family do for christmas? got any fun plans for new years eve? 

family traditions. the annual meyers family polaroid.

confession: here in the meyers household, we dont really do any of the things generally associated with the words "family tradition". its not that were trying to be cool or edgy or anything, its just that neither of us grew up in a household with a strong sense of tradition. my parents are very young and just not very sentimental, and jamess family moved a lot and had a constantly changing lifestyle. so the idea of doing things just because thats what our familys always done so thats what were going to do forever is just kind of foreign. 

that being said, there is one arbitrary family tradition that we accidentally stumbled upon. our annual family polaroid, taken by our good friend neal, in front of our front door, every year on july 7th. i say "accidentally" because the first one was taken spontaneously when neal and my sister emily came to visit us in prescott and helped us move into a completely ridiculous giant house that we could not afford (thankfully we only lived there for a few months). here it is:

this picture is actually pretty important because its one of about four pictures of me taken while i was pregnant with alice. i think i was around 25 weeks here? maybe a little more, i dont remember. i do, however remember avoiding being photographed because i didnt want to be reminded about all the time i spent as a puffy, miserable, giant, shiny, emotional whale (although in retrospect, i guess i didnt look nearly as bad as i felt at the time). 

just six months after that picture was taken, we had to pack up and move back to la, and when i was unpacking things to settle into our then-new apartment, i found the previous picture and noticed that july 7th was just a few days away, and that our polaroid camera had one more shot left in it. so we called neal over and took this one:

we had accidentally set the camera on the wrong exposure setting, and when the picture came out all blurry, i was REALLY sad that we didnt have another frame, but now i like it, because, frankly, that year was a total blur (we had a small baby, we moved twice, it took us what felt like FOREVER to get settled into stable jobs), and it really fits. 

that day we decided that neal would come over every year on july 7th to take our picture. since last year we used my last frame of expired polaroid film (that im pretty sure i bought when i was 19), the other day we went to urban outfitters for  a pack of impossible project film (even though its REALLY expensive, it was really important to me that the portraits continued to be polaroids). and heres the result:

 

this year was a lot more stable than last year, so the changes are more subtle. alice is bigger, my hairs longer, james has a better haircut, but were still at the same apartment, with the same jobs, and more or less the same life as last time. well have to see where next year takes us. 

do you have any odd family traditions? id love to hear about them.