Ten Things I Really Want for Christmas

1. I want to one-up the my-life-is-perfect Christmas card lady, the one who gets her cards out first, complete with staged photo of her hellion children and a one page, rhyming letter about how spectacular they all are.
2. I want to make cookies that don’t look like powdered sugar and butter got together and threw up a bunch of sprinkles.
3. I want to give my children the perfect gift so that they’ll be occupied for hours, all the while being educated.
4. I want the aforementioned to not require me to cut 50,000 wires and require a battery supply equivalent to a year’s college tuition.
5. I want my tree to look fancy, like one from a magazine with silver bows and white lights instead of the hokey colored lights and dozens of dough ornaments with buttons pushed in that I honestly love, but still, that fancy tree looks so fancy…
6. I want to have the glory of saying, “I’m done with shopping” in early December.
7. I want to rub the aforementioned into someone’s face, particularly someone like the person I morph into in mid-December, when the crunch is on and suddenly I’m buying As Seen On TV gifts for my in-laws at the drug store because in my holiday frazzled mind, it’s really a great product.
8. I want to make seriously perfect holiday memories.  Handmade stockings, reading The Night Before Christmas by firelight, matching pajamas, the works.
9. I want the world to travel to me (or not?) on Christmas day, so we don’t have to say to the kids, “Great!  New Toys!  Now put them away and go put on itchy clothes because we’re going to spend the rest of the day eating and riding in the car!  Yay!”
10. I want to fall asleep in wrapping paper with perfectly frosted cookies smeared on my face and even a little bit on my matching pajamas.  And then I want to take a picture and put it on next year’s card.  That’s right.