Saturday
Saturday I spent basically the whole day getting ready for Fools Play, by making/wrapping gifts for my fellow Fools and my favorite audience members. While Carrie was out doing some last-minute shopping, I painted three new paintings:
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I thought it would take me until, you know, noon or 1:00 to finish them, but I weren't finished until after 3:00.
At that point we thought that Susan's boyfriend and his daughter were gonna be in Texas during Christmas, visiting an aunt or something. But we then learned that they weren't able to make their stand-by flight, and so they were planning on being at my folks' place for Christmas! So Carrie & I went to Cost Plus World market so I could grab up some shotglasses for Jason (and so Carrie could get some last-minute stocking stuffers).
Instead of etching the shotglasses when I got home, though, I worked on the six juice glasses I was etching for me granmaw.
Then it was off to Fools Play for me! It was Santa's Lap, one of the more fun formats for the audience, because after every scene an audience member gets a prize, and another one gets to sit on one of our laps and ask for a gift. And then at the end of the show there's a spectacular, half-hour-long section where many, many of the recurring characters come out and sing carols. My favorites are when Pete & Bob sing "O Holy Night" (or "O Holy Blom" as Bob sings it), and Professor Horace & Cecil's rendition of the Chipmunk Christmas Song. There were many, many others, of course, and we ended with several FPRL people singing "Do You Hear What I Hear" while having a series of wrestling matches. Really, really good times.
After the show I handed out presents to everybody for whom I brought presents (including Brandy, who showed up just after the show ended; I had a feeling she might, so I brought along the present we were gonna give to her on Early Christmas). I got a couple in return, including some cloudy sake and cookies from Sandy, and this enormous, hand-sewn pillow from Leah!
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Everybody was really, really dawdling, and I didn't want to be out too late, so I went off to the restaurant and gave my presents to the people who slipped away before I could catch them at the theater. In return I got some yummy chocolates (and a pencil) from Tia & Cupcakeface. I ordered some cheese tots to go and ended up leaving right after everybody else from the theater arrived.
I got home and worked on Jason's shotglasses before hitting the proverbial hay.
Sunday (Christmas Eve)
In the morning I finished working on Jason's shotglasses, and then we met them and my family at Diamond Jim's in Federal Way for my family's traditional Christmas Eve Breakfast/Brunch out at a diner. Carrie & I both had the really excellent stuffed French toast (stuffed with ham and swiss cheese), while most everybody else got the #2 or #3.
When we first walked into the restaurant (we were the last to arrive) we were standing around for almost a full minute before Alexis saw us, and she gasped in delight and jumped up and threw her arms around Carrie. It was very, very cute.
Breakfast was a lot of crazy fun, as always whenever you get my whole family together.
We came home and straightened the house some, but then got a phone call from Linnea saying that they had some sorta stomach flu (this would feature prominently on Christmas as well; read on) and so couldn't come over in the afternoon and exchange gifts as planned. So Carrie & I had more leisurely time to finalize all of our gifts and wrappings and stocking stuffers and whatnot. I feel like something else happened during the afternoon, but I can't rightly recall now.
At 5:00 we headed to Mark & Viki's for their traditional Quebequois Christmas Eve dinner. It was basically the same menu as Last Year, which is A-OK with us! Delicious as always. We brought a cheese ball with us for the hors-d'ouvre table, and Nancy & Brian had their new-ish (seven months?) baby with them. It was the calmest, most docile baby I'd seen in a long, long time. It didn't even cry at the sight of me like most babies do at first! In fact, she actually let me hold her without even a fuss. I swear, a burglar could break into their house and ransack the whole place and she wouldn't make a fuss. The opposite of colic.
After dinner we went to Carrie's folks' house to stuff the stockings. As usual, there were about three times as many fully-wrapped stocking stuffers as there was room in the stocking.
Finally, after all that it was home, where Carrie & I exchanged gifts. Carrie gave me some nice new cargo pants; I gave her 'Twas the Night Before Christmas on DVD. It's her favorite Christmas special, but they hardly ever play it on TeleVision anymore, and when they do they edit out an entire song. So here it was, uncut and without commercial break!
Monday: Christmas
Christmas morning Carrie & I headed on over to my folks' place at 9:00 in the AM so we could (in this order) open stockings, have breakfast, then open presents. Bad news of bad news was that Susan had a horrible, vomitous stomach flu and did not think she would be able to make it, and therefore neither would Jason & Alexis (Carrie's very sympathetic response to his news: "It's Christmas; suck it up!"). We were unfortunately forced to plunge ahead without them.
Breakfast was the traditional Harris Family breakfast: Scrambled eggs, Mandarin oranges, li'l smokies, and orange rolls. We ate and ate and ate, especially Mike, who ate more li'l smokies than most of the rest of us combined. Man, what a great combination of breakfast foodstuffs.
Then it was prezzy time! The way it works in my family is that a present is given to each person there, then each person takes turns opening the present. These rounds continue until there are no more presents. It usually works out that all of one person's gifts are given out at once, i.e. in one round Mike will pass out the gifts that he got for everybody, then the next round Susan will, etc.
I got some cool stuff, including Mega Man ZX and TransFomers Season 2 Part 2. I also got a Hello Kitty waffle maker, which is extremely cute. Cute to the X-Treme! The coolest thing of all, though, was a new Nintendo wallet. Carrie got Project Runway Season 2, Stick It, and a new flax seed pillow (made personally by yours truly).
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At 11:30 we trundled over to my grandma's place for her portion of the day, where I received some Batman comics (the ones based on the animated series).
Then at 1:00 it was off to Carrie's folks' house for their segment of the day. It began, as per usual, with opening of the ungodly number of stocking stuffers. I received one INCREDIBLE stocking stuffer from Carrie. I can't actually believe it's a stocking stuffer:
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After the stockings was the exhausting process of opening the gifts. In this house, one person hands out one gift to each of the other people there, and then one to himself/herself. Then everyone opens their presents simultaneously and then shows them off to each other. There were many, many more rounds at Carrie's folks' house than there were at my folks' house, but it always ends up that way. And this was actually a smaller Christmas than last year!
Anyways, I ended up with more really cool things, including tonnes of geeky video game T-shirts, the complete Adventures Brisco County on DVD, and Yoshi's Island DS.
Carrie got a tonne of stuff as well, including Tetris DS (from me!).
After that I was very, very exhausted, so I took a nap in the later afternoon for an hour or two while the rest of the family played the card game "fascination." It took my entire nap for them to finish.
Around 6:00 was a very excellent dinner of goose, parmesan mashed potatoes, broccoli casserole, frozen cranberry salad, and Gulliver's corn (which I did not eat).
After dinner there was another card game, this one of Skip-Bo. I participated in this one (in fact I dealt), and came within two cards of actually winning it. By the time that game was done everyone said it felt like it was practically midnight, even though I don't think it was even 8:00 yet. The day had just been a marathon up to that point. But we decided to call it a night, not least of all because I was beginning to feel a cold coming on something fierce.
So we packed up all of the gifts from that house (so many bags) and headed exhaustedly on home, where we just lined the front of the fireplace with our un-packed gifts before going to bed.
Labels: Fools Play, Life, Pictures
