Yeah Yeah, It's Christmas, I know

This is the first Christmas I've spent completely alone.  Completely.  I've spent Christmas away from loved ones before, but I've never been this out of touch.  (I spent one year alone and pregnant in Salt Lake City, and another year sick in bed in a hotel room in Las Vegas.)  So in the weeks leading up to Christmas I'd tried to keep the holiday out of the forefront of my thoughts, worried that if I paid too much attention to it I would miss it more than I would be able to handle.  Out of sight, out of mind, I figured.  It's not my normal mode of operation, but I made an exception in this case, figuring if it works for other people, it might just work for me, just this once.

The problem is, Christmas is my absolute favorite holiday and I didn't want to get to December 26th and regret that I now had to wait another 364 days before I could celebrate it again.  So today I decided to take a risk and celebrate the only way I could - by glutting myself on back-to-back Christmas movie faves (most of which are Rankin/Bass classics).

I also made myself some homemade hot chocolate using shavings of Caribbean drinking chocolate.  And let me tell you this:  if the only kind of hot chocolate you've ever drunk came from a packet, you simply must try the homemade version.  It's an entirely different world.  It's like the difference in taste between anything 'strawberry-flavored', and the flavor of real strawberries.

Now if only I'd had a candy cane to dip into my hot chocolate, the whole thing would have been complete. 

At the end of the day I felt good, because I'd decided I wasn't going to wallow in self-pity, and I succeeded.  I recognize that this was a part of the choice I made when I decided to come to Trinidad.  On top of that, I reminded myself that there are a lot, a lot of people in the world that are a lot worse off than me right now.  And anyway, I surely wasn't the only one spending Christmas alone when they'd rather be with loved ones.

All in all, not such a bad day.

P.S.  I forgot to mention a bit of hilarity from the other day.  At the mall I heard some music on the radio that I vaguely recognized, and it took me a minute before I figured out that it was a muzak version of the Peanuts theme song.

It was all I could do not to break out in my best impression of the twins' dance.  :)