Holiday Habits Die Hard

December 22, 2025

Holiday Habits Die Hard

Seeing as ...

A.) I'm currently unemployed and there are only so many times you can scrub a toilet and doomscroll LinkedIn

B.) It's almost Christmas

... I'm busy trying to make the holiday season magical for my kids, as moms do. Only it's difficult as they get older because they are a lot more expensive and a lot harder to impress.

Every year since they were little, we've had the same tradition: at some point during mid- to late-December, we all pile in the car in our PJs with pillows and blankets and cups of hot cocoa and cruise around looking at Christmas lights while my Christmas playlist blares loudly enough to drown out any complaints. We did it again this year, but it was so weird because instead of a spontaneous "let's go look at Christmas lights" we had to, like, plan it around everybody's work schedules and such. Which is at this point virtually impossible, and actually sucks a little bit of the magic out of the occasion right off the bat.

Last year I bought six of these lidded Stanley camp mugs which are perfect for traveling with hot chocolate — in fact, I bought them specifically for our Christmas-light-gazing excursion. But when this year's excursion rolled around, guess how many of my precious Stanley mugs I could locate? TWO. And do you know why? Because my teenagers (and my 20-year-old) spirit away every glass and cup in the house and stash them in their rooms until they grow mold and we have no glasses in the cabinet so they start drinking out of things like measuring cups and Stanley mugs which then meet the same fate as the glasses and cups.

UGH.

So I sent two of my kids on a quick run to the Dollar Tree with ten bucks and a directive to "get something with lids" — which they did, but obviously Stanley mugs > dollar store plastic cups when it comes to ... well, nearly everything.

Because we almost never go anywhere as an entire family all at once any more now that three of my four kids are driving their own cars, I forget how crowded our small SUV gets when everyone is piled in. Especially when said "kids" are now the size of grown men. Grown men with pillows and blankets and questionably-secure cups of cocoa. But though they may be the size of grown men, their maturity level has not quite caught up to their physical development in many ways, which is why the two back rows were filled with deep-voiced exclamations of lovely things like "Scoot over, bitch" as they wrangled for individual space.

And whether my kids are small and tattling or large and taking matters into their own (profane) hands, one thing remains consistent: a hot chocolate catastrophe of some sort. This year was no different, and ten minutes into the trip Colin's cocoa had spilled and he was mopping it up with his socks while moaning that his pajama pants were soaked.

There were complaints about farts. Requests to play rap instead of Christmas music. Decidedly non-festive discussions of YouTubers (which drowned out the Christmas music, not the other way around). I'm not sure if anyone actually looked at the lights or if we just wasted half an hour's worth of gas for something we could have done at home.

Since I always like to include an image with every post (y'know, giving y'all the ol' razzle-dazzle and whatnot) I asked AI to create an image of the scenario. It made a couple of my kids look ... unwell, gave me one extra offspring, and threw in a ... friend? ... for Curtis while I appear to be shoved miserably into the backseat.