CHRISTMAS IS ALMOST HERE AND I'M TOTALLY UNPREPARED!!!

I look at the calendar and grimace.... December 16th!!! UGGHHH!! Mind you, I am never "early" for Christmas like some of my more OCD friends, but I have NEVER been this late!!! I had a trial scheduled for December 23rd (how awful is that?) but it was continued until January so at least I don't have that to worry about but how the HELL can it possibly be 9 days until Christmas????

I had SUCH good intentions!! Was going to do SO many things!!! But can I wrap good intentions and put a bow on it? NOT!! So here I am .... in a funk.... refusing to stress! I marvel at the fact that I have not bought ONE SINGLE PRESENT.... have not made ONE SINGLE decision on the menu for our Christmas Eve "Pachanga" (after all we ARE Cuban and Christmas Eve has to be an all out party!) which I am hosting as I have for the past 15 years! Think maybe hot dogs and hamburgers??? Don't think so! We MUST have a whole pig (head and all) which MUST be made in a pit (which takes 13 hours to cook - hey! it's 60 pounds of pork okay!?) There MUST be all the traditional foods and desserts.... Can anyone say CATERERS?

The only thing I AM going to do regardless of HOW and WHEN is a present for my Dad that I have had on my mind for months now. I was at my dad's house a few months ago (he had just had a stroke) and he was coming to grips with his mortality I guess and he gave me a whole BAG full of letters he had received from his father (his mother couldn't write) from 1965 when we left Cuba until he died in November of 1975. My dad has taken care of and protected these letters all these years and the importance of him giving them to me for safekeeping was not lost on me. I bought a 16x20 shadow box frame (it opens from left to right. I want to copy some of these letters (I SWEAR reading them makes me cry each time I pick them up) and collaging them in this frame with scattered pictures of my grandfather and my grandmother (who I never met). You have to read these letters to understand but I will translate a short snippet of one of these letters:

Mother's Day 1966

My son:

As I write you these lines, my heart is heavy with your mother's sadness.
Last night while we were laying in bed, she cried out to the God she has
so much faith in and asked him to open the skies so that she could see
your face. She cried and told me she doesn't understand a world where
she can't see or speak to her child.....

Just translating that puts a lump in my throat. What kind of love did my Father feel for us that he left his ENTIRE family behind to get us out of that condemned island? So you see.... I HAVE to find the time to make this for him.