Happy Holidays!

Merry Christmas.

Happy Hanukkah.

Merry or Happy Kwaanza.

Whatever you and yours celebrate, I hope you had a merry and happy one.

Charlie's birthday is six days before Christmas. Whenever people hear this, they all make a sad puppy face, and say what a shame it's so close to Christmas, and we should consider celebrating it in June so he doesn't get shafted.

Shafted? This kid is the luckiest kid alive.

Not only does he get birthday presents AND Christmas presents, but he gets Hanukkah presents, too.

The perfect trifecta.

Here he is playing with his xylophone his Nonnie got him:



People get creeped out when they hear that we don't celebrate Christmas in our house. So I don't tell many people. But I'm telling you today that we don't. We also don't celebrate Hanukkah here.

That doesn't mean we don't celebrate at all.

Here's the deal - I was raised Catholic. Jase was raised Jewish. But we're both not religious people. We kind of balk at the whole organized religion thing. At the risk of inviting years of therapy on our kid, we have decided to expose Charlie to both Christmas and Hanukkah. In the meantime, he'll follow our own "religion".

We call it Ritchieism. Be good to other people. Respect the environment. Treat every day like a gift.

He's a little young to understand all of it, but he'll soon get to the age where he wonders why there's no Christmas tree or menorrah and ask for Santa or Hanukkah Harry to visit his home.

So here's how were handling it. Every year, we are going to celebrate Christmas as his Nonnie's house in Michigan. And every year we are going to celebrate Hanukkah at his Bubbe and Zada's in San Diego.

Our house? Birthday central, baby.

This means no less than three celebrations in the month of December. I don't know what he will think once he's in school and he compares his holidays to those of his classmates. Hopefully all his friends will look upon him in envy, rather than confusion. It's better to be envied than misunderstood. But in any case, we hope he gets that he is loved by all of us, no matter what religion, if any, he chooses to follow.

We spent Christmas Eve at the beach, because we could.



We also spent the week taking care of Tankini the pug while our neighbors went out of town.



Check out all the other pics. They are quite good. And here's another video of him playing with this stacking toy his Aunt Anne got for him - he's a kid obsessed. And we hope you all had a happy and merry holiday!!