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"All I Want for Christmas" by Mariah Carey

...I won't ask for much this Christmas / I won't even ask for snow / I'm just gonna keep on waiting / underneath the mistletoe...make my wish come true / baby all I want for Christmas is yooouuu...

Merry Christmas. Or Happy Holidays.

I am having a wonderful time with family in Northern Virginia. I've been here visiting for the break for almost two weeks now. There is a lot of life here. My cousins and my aunt are so energetic and funny.

We talk loud, eat a lot, make a mess, insult each other jokingly, and sleep late everyday.

The house is warm and the televisions and game systems are plenty. And the merriment makes the walls all glow and we're all brighter for it.

Yesterday night we had a Christmas Eve dinner and had a pseudo-party as we cooked. We brought a CD player down and acted a fool to old and new dance songs from back Home. I haven't been able to have such moments with family and it felt so nice. I felt kind of human...and loved maybe.

We have been wrapping gifts for the past couple of days and have stuffed them under our small tree. There were 13 of us in the house for Christmas and about three times as many gifts under the tree. Although I argued that we would be ruining tradition if we didn't wait until we woke up to open our gifts, they were definitely unwrapping at 12:01am.

It's a wonderful Christmas. My younger cousins aren't so young anymore and they all have jobs and bought gifts this year. They are all such sweet, generous, considerate people, very different from the children I had to wait on hand and foot a few years ago.

We're all just happy, even if it's just for these few days. And I don't know if Christmas does really have magic about it, if it's all the food and drink, or if it's the media telling us to be happy during this season, but whatever it is, I love this season.

I love how kind people are to each other, how considerate, how selfless people are. This is how I wish the world could be all year round.

I don't think highly of my fellow human being to be honest. I think that we are a selfish bunch. We care about ourselves and possibly the few around us. We let party lines, religion, racial lines, culture, etc. to divide and categorize us such that we are evil to one another.

But during this time of year, the animosity seems to subside a little bit. We extend a loving hand that is rather paralyzed during other times of the year.

I read an article on CNN's website about another family facing foreclosure after some mess had occurred earlier in the year with illness and a jobloss. A friend put their story on her blog and set up an account so that people could make donations.

In under 2 weeks, the blog had raised over $11,000. How amazing is that? The really amazing part are the people who donated. They were people who had also lost their homes, had cars repossessed, lost jobs and the ilk.

This is a sad Christmas for a lot of people and I'm glad that despite it, people are able to preserve the spirit of the season and think of people above themselves. Go team human race. Maybe I underestimate us.