What do you want for Christmas?

For the past couple of months, whenever someone asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I replied, "An operating dishwasher!" I bought a dishwasher to have installed in my kitchen, currently under renovation, but the appliance has been sitting in the corner of my living room. The house I bought two + years ago didn't have a dishwasher and I was getting tired of washing dishes by hand.

The Home Depot-inspired nightmare that has been my kitchen project left me without a kitchen counter and therefore without a kitchen sink or an operating dishwasher. For the past two weeks, I've been hand-washing my dishes in a bucket in the bathtub. I've had no running water in the kitchen.

Funny how our priorities can change, isn't it? I've gone from longing for a dishwasher to rescue me from washing dishes in the sink to longing for a kitchen sink to save me from washing dishes in the bathtub!

Paul came down last night and built a wood frame over the sink cabinet so he could temporarily install my kitchen sink while I await the delivery of the new countertop. I now have water in the kitchen! I can wash dishes in my sink! Hallelujah! Merry Christmas!

In speaking with a friend at work yesterday, I got a dose of reality concerning how spoiled we really are. She's one of 14 children. They grew up living in project housing - many children sleeping sideways across a single bed, eating dinners in shifts, the older kids helping to take care of the younger kids. Every summer, they spent a month at the home of her paternal grandparents. They lived on a farm in the country. The only source of heat in the house was the wood stove. Want some hot water? You had to heat it on the woodstove. From a cup of coffee to a bath (there was no shower), all hot water had to be heated in pots on the stove. My friend remembers these times fondly. There were lots of cousins there and they all got to play together on the farm. In retrospect, it wasn't much of a vacation for her mother, who was generally pregnant and had bunches of kids to care for in a home that was built to pioneer standards. But her parents wanted the kids to have time in the country, playing with their cousins. Her father would be there for two of the four weeks. During that time, they'd be cutting and bailing the hay, using horse-drawn carts and hand-tools. That two weeks was her father's vacation time from his job. Some vacation, huh?

It made me realize how easy my life is and how much I should appreciate what I have. Everything is relative.

Merry Christmas! I hope you all have a happy, healthy and prosperous new year.