This Christmas....will be.....

This Christmas will be, if nothing less, a Christmas of lessons learned.  It will be about appreciating the things that really matter and hopefully focusing on family and not loot. This isn't because I have any great morals or anything, it's because I'm broke. This is my first Christmas in ten years on my own with these two fourteen year old boys.  And I have tried very hard the past nine months to keep this divorce from causing them to suffer.  I have eaten peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, or even had no lunch at all, to be sure they had enough food to eat at dinner or even to be sure they had bookfair money.  I'm not saying this to get a pat on the back, i'm saying this to make it evident the changes in my lifestyle over the past year.  Usually my STBX has a $2400 christmas club check that we got around November. Christmas was a fun time of buying all those presents for people that I knew they'd never buy themselves. This Christmas is crunching numbers, prioritizing and seeing who I can cross off the list altogether. This past Friday I got paid.  The only thing I really really wanted to get my children was a bigger television set for the living room, which would double as a gift because I could then give one of my kids the living room t.v. and he could use it in his room.  So I crunch the numbers, call in a favor to my mom (so i can not pay the cell or electric bill) and I take my check to town, do a little comparative shopping, and by god I come home with a decent enough t.v.  I know they will love it, and i know they will be excited. But shifting money and bills around isn't what Christmas SHOULD be about. But this year it is. I said that to say this: Even so, that worry is by far a "better worry" than the worries I had this time last year.  There's nothing like a divorce (or any major change in life, I suppose) to put things into perspective for you. My perspective is this:  You can crunch numbers, but you can't buy happiness. Happiness is free, you just have to know where to shop.