Happy, new, year.

To herald the death of the old year and the arrival of the new, we allowed Henry to do the heretofore unthinkable: stay up until midnight. Would he manage it? He is a boy who is usually snoring peacefully by eight p.m. and stays that way for eleven or so hours. When he stays up even an hour after his bedtime, he devolves into a blithering maniac who skitters from room to room on all fours, speaking in tongues. So we had our doubts. Still, though, we were attending a get-together wherein the children would be pajama'd up and free to snooze, if they needed, so the worst that could happen is that he crashed along with some other preschoolers. Also, when had we not been sitting at home being boring, for New Year's Eve, since Henry was born? Never, is when.

By allowing Henry to stay up until midnight, we granted him his heart's desire. Every few days Henry pleads with me to let him stay up late. "But you will be insane," I tell him, but that makes no difference to him. Night time is when all the exciting stuff happens. When we don our smoking jackets and trade witty quips. And then retire to the playroom, to enjoy our Bionicles until the sun comes up.

Anyway, the party actually went well. Although the children were marinated in sugar and hopping up and down on each other's heads, there were no tears, no bloodshed, no broken bones. Henry was cheerful, if drowsy. As the clock struck midnight, he wrapped his flannel-clad body around me and whispered, "Please, can I go to bed, now? "

So all was fine and dandy, until we got home, and he went to sleep. And woke up. And woke up again. There are four reasons why he won't be up until midnight again until he's at least 30.

1. 2:00 am. I wake up to the sound of someone crashing around downstairs. There's a burglar! We're being burgled on the first day of 2008! Also, there's weeping. A highly emotional burglar is lurching around our home. I run to the stairs to restrain him and/or provide emotional succor. But of course it's Henry, who's on his way back up after wrecking the place, and is sobbing. "What's wrong?" I ask him. He lurches back to bed. "Aaaiiiiiigh," he tells me, and I ask him to repeat himself, but he's snoring.

2. 2:30 a.m. A pitiful wailing wakes me up. I make my way to Henry's bed, where he's under the covers, shrieking. "You have to ree my snore!" he screams. "What?" "You have to ream my store!" "WHAT?" "READ ME A STORY." Oh, I am so in the mood to read some Magic Schoolbus. But that must wait. Until I'm CONSCIOUS.

3. 3:00 a.m. Weeping, banging, screaming. I make Scott get up. More weeping, more screaming. Some of it is Scott. I get up. They're in the bathroom. "My eye hurts!" Henry is shrieking. There is much clutching of the eye and tossing his head back and forth, while Scott tries to get a look at what's going on in there. "If your eye is injured, my boy, you should let me look at it," Scott offers. "Quite," I murmur. (What, you don't think we can be that calm and reasonable at 3 am? You calling me a liar?) "NAAAAGH!" Henry wails, and runs back to his bed. Somehow I manage to pin him down and look at his eye. Because Henry's eyelashes are nine feet long, when there's a pain, it's usually an eyelash. In this case, his eye is fine. "There's nothing there, Henry," I tell him. He's asleep.

4. 3:30 a.m. Crying. More crying! I go there. To him. What do you want, what, WHAT? "I NEED TO PEE," he cries. I recommend that he goes to the bathroom. And stop myself from explaining loudly that I DO NOT NEED TO HELP HIM OUT WITH THIS. ALL CAPS.

And there you have it. We started the new year with a bang. And a whimper. And a poorly aimed whiz.

And so that was Christmas.

As I was saying. Christmas, man. Wow. I am nodding thoughtfully while gazing out the window. Now I am punching my palm with my fist. I don't know why. And I'm biting my knuckles. What am I doing?

Christmas was a roaring success, but on the days leading up to it, I went about 40% too crazy for my physical health. Like, on Christmas Eve, I shouldn't have spent over seven hours in the kitchen preparing Christmas dinner. Four hours, I could have done. But not seven. Seven is too many. It leads to pains in the body and stabby stabbiness in the temples.

I'm biting my knuckles again.

Christmas, though! I was worried that Henry wouldn't experience the heartstopping joy on Christmas morning that I remembered from my long-ago youth, but all my fears were unwarranted. Just the idea that Santa showed up was almost more than he could handle. He leaped into our bed Christmas morning, and I volunteered to go downstairs and see if Santa had come. "Look at the plate of cookies," Henry instructed me. "If the cookies are eaten, that's a good sign that I got presents." Another good sign? Presents.

Anyway, as I am sure you are aware, Santa had indeed visited at some point in the night, leaving as silently as he arrived, and Henry hyperventilated at the sight of his presents in a manner that I found intensely gratifying. "I must have been really good this year," he kept saying. He was pleased with pretty much everything he unwrapped. Just the act of unwrapping was enough for him. I could have wrapped anything. His pillow, nail clippers, a tuning fork. Instant Present! Next year I will wrap each individual Lego piece.

My family came and there were more presents, and drinks, and dinner was actually edible, and best of all, my nephew Paul completed a massive Star Wars Lego project with Henry, helping him build some kind of droid army in a battleship made of over 1300 pieces, and not once was I called upon to assist. Henry would come out once in a while, grab a cookie, and then announce that he had to return to the "Trade Federation." Whatever, kid, as long as it doesn't involve me standing or moving.

One thing would have made it perfect. Scott came up with the idea of dressing as Jacob Marley for Christmas, rattling the chains he forged in life, clutching his head bandage. When someone asked him how his job was going, he was going to wail, MANKIND SHOULD HAVE BEEN MY BUSINESS WAAAIOOOOUUU. I pictured him camping it up as a spectre while my family tried to act nonchalant, and I begged him to do it. But nooo. Something about not having time to construct a costume, and he didn't really mean it, and anyway it would only be funny to us.

Bah.

Anyway, I swallowed my bitter disappointment and enjoyed myself. And now it's two days later and I can barely crawl across the room without wanting to curl up and take a leisurely twelve-hour siesta. I don’t know if it was all the hard work or the many glasses of Amaretto-Cranberry Kiss. Or both! Probably both.

It's been a long day.

One of these boys attended a cookie decorating party at his friend's house, then came home and played for the remainder of the day, occasionally taking a break to enjoy the fruits of his cookie labors. The other one endured six hours of holiday-shopping-related horrors. Guess which one is really asleep?

There you go.

New Wonderland up today. Now I'm off to wrap six million presents and drink some wine. I predict that the gifts will become increasingly less presentable as the night wears on. For my last gift, I'll tape the cat to a box and lurch upstairs to bed.

Actually we're decorating the tree with Legos.

This weekend our dryer died, and we had to purchase a new one. We explained to Henry that the dryer would be his one and only Christmas present. He asked if he could take a tumble or two in it, and we said only on low heat.

I'm kidding! He can't fit in there. Our dryer did die, though, that part is true. Scott and I were sad, and we turned our pants pockets inside-out and walked around like that for a while, feeling sorry for ourselves. But then this morning, an editor called and offered me some money to reprint one of my posts. The fee came out to exactly as much as the dryer cost. So it seems that we'll have a Christmas after all! And maybe a little Hanukkah, as well!

I'm hosting Christmas for my family this year, and the pressure is on. My parents have always done Christmas, every year, since before Christ was born. Somehow they got Nat King Cole to sing all these festive songs about this savior who no one even knew about. My parents have powers. Anyway, I'm a little intimidated. My mother is trying to help, except by trying to help she's making me feel increasingly inadequate. A few weeks ago she brought over some Christmas-themed trays, Christmas votive-candle holders, and several decorative wreaths she fished out of her Christmas Decorative Wreath box in the Decorative-Wreath wing of her basement. Then she asked me if I wanted to use her "Christmas goblets."

"Whurrrgh?" I said.

"You know, my festive goblets. I use them for every Christmas. You're going to need those, right?"

"I kind of thought I could just use my regular wine glasses and stuff," I said.

"Oh," she said, in the tone she'd use if I said we were going to decorate our tree with steaming dog turds. "Yeah, I mean, of course you can. I just thought, you know, because they're so festive and nice. But that's fine too."

She also wanted to know if I wanted her fancy red Christmas plates. We have plates, I said, but thanks. (I mean, usually we eat out of our cupped hands, but I think we could fashion some flat-surfaced food holders from old pie tins.) Okay, but, uh, don't we want her extra-special linen Christmas tablecloth? Christmas placeholders? Christmas napkins? We're going to need Santa, too, right? Because she's got him in the basement, next to the reindeer stalls.

Believe me, I love my mom, and she has excellent taste. It's not that I don't like her stuff; it's that I don't want to have her Christmas over here. I want our own decorations, even if they're from Target. I just heard her gasp all the way from Long Island. I swear we're going to go to the store and nothing will be there. "Some woman came earlier today and cleared the place out," the baffled salesperson will tell us. "She looked a little bit like you, actually. Said something about keeping all this cheap crap away from her daughter? She wasn't making much sense."

Now she wants to know what I'm making for dinner. I'm going to tell her we're ordering in some Chinese, just to hear her head explode. Hey, my husband is Jewish, and we have to respect his traditions, too.

UPDATED TO ADD: I turned off comments because I think some people misinterpreted my statements about my mother. I was exaggerating for comic effect, like I do, and in reality (boring, boring reality) I can't wait to have Christmas here and she and the rest of my family will be thrilled with whatever I serve. I know some of the comments would hurt her feelings, and that's the last thing I want. "Merry Christmas! I got the Internet to make you cry!" It just ruins the holiday mood, you know?