Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Christmas Greetings!!!

Growing up, I always thought when I got married, holidays would be a no brainer. We would spend them all with my family and that would be that. Well, apparently that's not how the rest of the world, or my husband, thinks. And so, since we did our first married Christmas with my family, it was his family's turn this year.

Since it's really a Christmas Day celebration with his family, we signed up to be greeters at church for Christmas Eve. This seemed like a good idea at the time because we could spread good cheer (and we all know I have a lot of that to go around, year round) and most importantly, we would get reserved seating. And if you ever go to church on Christmas Eve, you know seating can be a problem so this fact in and of itself made signing up to shake strangers hands a bonus. However, if you have ever known me, you also know shaking a stranger's hand is about the last thing I want to do. And I certainly don't want to have to talk to a stranger. Call me a grinch but I don't care if it is Christmas. I do not want to shake your hand or extend to you any kind of heavenly and holy mumbo jumbo that requires me to get near to you. Walking in to take our greeting position, I confessed to Bill that I was having second thoughts because shaking hands and hugging strangers was really just not my thing, to which he informed me I was in the wrong line of volunteer work if I was just realizing this now (apparently my mother must have had a hunch too since she txted me to remind to be nice and friendly to all the strangers I encountered during our greeting shift).  So, we came up with a game plan. We would just open the doors for everyone! We opted for the doors that we thought were the least popular. Little did we know those doors open up to a giant parking lot we had no idea existed (but i guess a good take away is that now we now know where we can park when they realize we've been parking in the reserved visitors' lot for oh about a year now). Everyone seemed appreciative of the double door opening they received as they approached the church, but let's be honest a "well this is some good greeting!" or a "aren't y'all the nicest greeters I've ever seen!" doesn't really make up for the completely weird looks we got at the same time. I mean, it's not like we got any training on this whole greeting thing. We only signed up to have our names in the bulletin and to get good seating.

About 5 minutes till the service began, Bill and I had had enough of the greeting so we left the doors to open themselves and went on in to to find our specially reserved seats. Turns out the extended family - yes EXTENDED FAMILY - of the other greeters had also found our seats. So we sat 15 on a row in reserved seating (the other greeters must have done a better job than us because they were not early or right on time for the service. They were so busy greeting they were a few minutes late). So much for not getting near to a stranger and so much for bonus of reserved seating on Christmas Eve. All of our greeting had clearly been in vain since apparently reserved seating doesn't equal spacious seating. Thankfully communion started and Bill read my mind when he leaned over to me and asked if I wanted to get outta there. Of course I did...my hands were just salivating for some sanitizer from holding onto the door handles so much, and as such, instead of returning to our seats after partaking in the elements, we just walked on out of the church. Ain't nobody ever worn their coats and taken their purse to take communion but then again, ain't nobody gonna hold these greeters down either.

But I guess if your good seating for being a greeter turns out to be a bust, you might as well at least beat the traffic by getting out of church early. Although, that may have something to do with our good parking since we do park in the visitors' lot...



Wednesday, January 14, 2015

tis the season...to go insane

Sorry for the lack of posting lately. I promised to be better, and then I promptly failed.

In a nutshell, since our anniversary (so, 3 months), we have done the following things:

a) bought a house
b) gone to Mexico (and almost died as you know)
c) done reno work at the house
d) moved into the house
e) had Christmas
f) gone to Italy for 2 weeks
g) gone skydiving

I have a long list of things to blog about. Stay tuned!!