My wife and I have decided not to celebrate Christmas this year, but just my birthday, which is on Christmas Eve.
Call it being Scrooges, call it a middle finger to our super-traditional families who live overseas, call it whatever.
From September last year to June/July this year my youngest daughter went through a battery of chemo treatments for leukaemia, and she and my wife were in hospital for weeks at a time during these treatments.
We spent Christmas, New Year's, and even Easter in a little hospital room, in a cancer ward full of sick kids, some of whom didn't make it.
My daughter is one of the lucky ones who did, and through the whole ordeal our families overseas (who have absolutely no understanding of the toll it took on us) kept pestering us about when we could fly over there and visit.
So yeah, the kids will still have presents to unwrap this year, but it'll be in celebration of Daddy's birthday. My wife and I buy shit for each other throughout the year, so we agreed to just spoil the kids this time.
But what she doesn't know is that I've ordered a bunch of "toys" in honor of her new favourite books, the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy.