The Day After

"There's nobody in this world I hate more than T.O. Except the Pope."

I think that was the best comment Grandpa made during this year's Christmas festivities. (Incidentally, I don't think he has a personal vendetta against this particular pope, he just dislikes any organized religion but particularly Catholicism...I think it mostly stems from the fact that he's an ob/gyn who has worked most of his life in the county hospital and he gets frustrated with the poor women coming to the hospital to give birth to the tenth child they can't support because they're devoutly Catholic and don't believe in birth control) Grandpa also pointed out several times that this could be his last Christmas, but got mad at me when I pointed out that it could be anybody's last Christmas. The boys spent most of Christmas dinner telling dirty jokes over the prime rib. It was pretty much Christmas as always.

My aunt, uncle, and two cousins from New Jersey are visiting for Christmas, so it has been fun hanging out with them. Cohen enjoyed the Christmas Eve fondue and ate enough meat for six basset hounds. We've all been laughing a lot and I'm having a good time.
I got some really nice Christmas presents: a few shirts and sweaters, a pair of Citizens of Humanity jeans (I have now fully rationalized wearing jeans that cost $200 a pair. After all, what else do you wear pretty much every day of your life? Plus they really are ten times more comfortable), a couple of books, a bunch of makeup and perfume and lotion and other girly things like that, some workout clothes and workout DVDs. Chelsea's Christmas gift to me was a ticket to see The Lion King when it tours through Austin in March, and she and Shane gave me my very belated birthday present, a gift certificate to the Four Seasons! I'm extremely excited about that. I'm thinking I'll probably use it at the spa. Mmmm, the spa. The biggest surprise was my grandma's Christmas gift to all of us. She decided that all of her grandchildren need to see the nation's capitol, so she's paying for my family and my aunt's family to take a vacation to Washington D.C. (The relatives from New Jersey have already been to Washington D.C. a few times, so they're getting a trip to Colorado to go skiing instead). I don't know when we'll go, probably sometime this summer, but I'm already excited. I feel like it's the only major U.S. city I've never visited, so it's about time (I'd say L.A., New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C. are the four big ones, wouldn't you?). Plus we always have a really good time on family vacations, so I'm glad we already have one in the works for this summer. The other big surprise was that it turns out my great-grandmother, who passed away last December, left all of us grandkids some money. It wasn't a lot of money, but in my case it's enough to buy some new bedding, the one Christmas gift I wanted but didn't actually get. So all in all it was a very good Christmas for materialistic reasons as well as the more important family fun reasons.

Want to know what my favorite Christmas present was, though? When I was a baby I was obsessed with this book called Hide and Seek With Wilma Worm. My mom likes to tell the story of the time I made my dad read it so much one afternoon he finally got fed up and hid it under a couch cushion and then later that night she had to call him at work to figure out where he'd put it because I was having a screaming fit and wouldn't go to sleep without reading the book. We also have an entire page in my baby photo album that is nothing but pictures of various relatives reading the book to me. At some point I finally outgrew the book and it got lost, but on Christmas Eve I opened a present from Grandma and there it was, a used copy of Hide and Seek With Wilma Worm!! I hadn't seen it in twenty years. It's fabulous, it teaches you to count all the way to five. I can see why my parents despised reading it over and over again. But I loved it so much I used to sleep with it at night like it was a stuffed animal. It's nice to have a copy of it again.

So that was my Christmas. I hope everyone else feels pleasantly spoiled and stuffed full of food and loved today, too.