Thanks to the good luck of a training schedule that doesn’t start back up until January 6 and a smattering of distance learning classes that have allowed me to still do work on official work days, our holiday celebrations haven’t ended just yet.

After splitting the last week and a half between Missouri and Illinois, we’re now settled at our final stop, Ohio — which, by the way, I’m pretty sure is Abbey’s favorite. At the others she had to live with a combined total of 12 dogs, including three giant, slobbery and playful Dobermans. Here, finally, there are none.

So even though you’ve surely moved on to other things, we’re still in Christmas mode. You’ll have to endure one more holiday-themed post from us. Sorry!

Even though our Christmases didn’t  revolve around the Foreign Service this year, it would be a lie to claim that we forgot all about our impending move to Benin while home for the holidays. After all, why else would we find ourselves in the check-out line at Meijer on December 27 with 17 rolls of Christmas wrapping paper?

Yes, it was marked down to 75% off, so the grand total was pretty close to nothing; still, we’re not used to buying in bulk and surely wouldn’t have done it we weren’t going to be out of the U.S. for the next two Christmases. Do they even have wrapping paper in Benin? I doubt it. So now we’re all set. And, considering we only went through 2.5 rolls of wrapping paper this year, some of our future friends and colleagues in Benin are probably set too.

We weren’t as successful in finding a fake Christmas tree, unfortunately. There were a few problems. The first is that, being a life-long real Christmas tree advocate, I have strange parameters for what my fake Christmas tree should be like. Basically, if it must be fake, I at least don’t want it to be pretending to be real. I want something modern. Quirky. Artsy. Something like this:

Or maybe this:

But, alas, I’m also not willing to pay as much as these modern, quirky and artsy fake Christmas trees seem to cost. So I finally resolved to just break down and buy a fake fake one, since that’s what Andy would prefer anyway. However, by the time I made this decision, all the discounted fake trees were long gone.

So we’ll have nicely wrapped presents for Christmas 2011 and Christmas 2012. Whether we’ll have a tree to put them under, who knows.