Christmas Oops...

Last year was our first Christmas as a married couple, and we celebrated all week with various families. It started on Christmas Eve with my family, and we all had a great time. After three hours of unwrapping gifts, it was time to pack the loot up and bring it home.

Christmas morning was our own personal Christmas. We opened gifts together after eating cinnamon strudel muffins, and Mitch felt a little bad about the number of gifts I had to unwrap in comparison to him. What had happened was that he got me the camera lens and a Dallas Cowboy's watch that I really wanted, which left little money for much else, so I ended up with some Cowboys socks (which I love) and six packages of Cowboys pens in addition to the two large gifts. I had no problem with this. I knew that my gifts were more expensive than his, but he still felt a bad about something that I wasn't bothered by at all. It was cute.

Then came Christmas with the Terlisner's a couple of days later. They just tear into their gifts, rather than each person opening them individually, so we all got our piles and started opening. Well, to be more exact, everyone else opened gifts. We had two gifts addressed to the two of us, but I didn't have anything that was just for me. Ok, so I know this sounds selfish, and not really in the Christmas spirit, but imagine being new in a family and getting nothing from them while everyone else opened gifts, and because of the way they open gifts, nobody notices.

Eventually, Laurie stops and asks, with a huge smile on her face, if I liked my gift from them. I choked back the tears as I answered that I didn't have one. All of a sudden she turned and exclaimed, "MITCH!"

Now, Mitch had known for the past five minutes that I was about to break down into tears at any moment, but it hadn't sunk in yet. When Laurie yelled his name, he jumped up and ran to the guest room where he retrieved an unwrapped shoe box, and sheepishly set it in front of me. It was from Bev, Laurie, and Katie. When I opened it, it was like the heavens opened up and reigned down their glory into that tiny box. Laying in the bottom of the box was a number 82, Jason Witten Cowboy's jersey. It had come in weeks before, and Mitch had forgotten to wrap it and put it under the tree.

It came in handy a few weeks later and the Cowboys/Giants playoff game.