Slay-Bells Ring

 I don't even know when I meant to post that, and now it's the 27th and I should PROBABLY change the title to something cheesy like That's a Wrap. I'm always amazed at the people that keep blogging through Christmas, but then I am barely standing by the end of Christmas Eve. 

Our Christmas routine for the past several years has been that my parents (and my sister's family if they're here) come over here on Christmas Eve and I do the food, mostly in appetizer form. Christmas morning we get up and open presents with the kids, then go to my parents' house for breakfast (where my sister's family sleeps if they're here) and exchange more gifts, and then separate for the afternoon, and dinner is here - Matt cooks the turkey, I make biscuits and my mom does sides. This means that most of my work is done by the end of Christmas Eve when I fill the stockings and put the presents out. 

We used to go to my parents' place for dinner but as they've gotten older it makes more sense to pick them up and bring them over here for both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and then bring them home and leave all the mess here. Usually my sister and her husband and my niece and nephew are here for Christmas proper or not at all. Last year they had to cancel because of Snowpocalypse 2022, after missing two years because of Covid, and it really really sucked. This year my niece is doing a Masters degree in the UK so they're coming for New Year's for a couple of days so they didn't have to drive as soon as she got home (they live about six hours away). As much as I enjoy a Whirlwind of Family Togetherness followed by some hardcore slothfulness, it will be nice to have a few days of rest followed by a little more celebratory family stuff. Angus got invited to go to a coaching conference in Nashville that he also went to last year, but he'll be here for the first day my sister's fam is, which is nice because they haven't seen him in a while (he was gone back to Ithaca before they came in the summer and they missed him when they missed last Christmas).

On the 23rd Eve and I went to Indigo to get gifts for her friends and .... something else I think, I already forget. Usually I can't bear to go shopping this close to Christmas, but my increased antidepressant dosage and my daughter being home both seemed to give me a boost, and we actually had a really nice time. When we were ready, the line was insanely long, and a manager was walking around warning us that the computers and card systems were very slow because of the increased load. We settled in for a long wait, but the line moved quite quickly, so either the systems recovered quickly or they did a really good job managing expectations. Also, I think the manager walking around talking to people was someone who interviewed at the same time as me when I tried to get hired at Indigo before I got on with the school board AND THEY REJECTED ME. Honestly, Keisha was straight fire at the job and they were right that I wasn't in it for the long haul, so good sense on their part. 

I woke up with a mild head cold Christmas Eve which is a bit of a drag BUT it's not Covid, and also I was mostly done everything I needed to do and got to do all the fun Christmas stuff before getting sick. I felt awful for all the people whose Christmas plans were torpedoed by Covid yet again. 

Christmas Eve was pretty much perfect. I'm always happy to have my parents over, and they love to see the kids, but sometimes the conversational flow is just particularly good. We had a couple of trivia games - one Millenials vs. Boomers and one After Dinner Trivia thing. The first one mostly resulted in a bunch of book questions that only I knew the answer to, and my dad accused the kids of just trying to make me look good. But there was a question about dynamite that prompted my dad to talk about some of his early days mining up north, which resulted in other entertaining stories about my mom's early nursing days, and every time there was a lag one of the kids would throw in another question. It worked really well.

My parents went home pretty early. I usually putter around and wait for the kids to go to bed before I pull out all the presents, but I was lagging. This was the first year I just started stuffing the stockings and putting out presents while everyone was still up (I mean, they're 20 and 23, this was out of habit more than anything). Both kids were still wrapping gifts in various corners of the house, and people would yell "may I approach?" before intruding. 

My mother made giant stockings for the kids when they were babies, so a lot of stuff fits in. When the kids were little, the rules was Eve would get up and go to Angus's room and they would open the stockings together before waking us up. Now no one gets up super early, and I like watching them open the stocking stuff, so we do it all around the tree. 

He's been coaching his old undergrad team so I got him a Coach of the Year ornament

Angus puts on all the clothing he gets as he opens it. This is him putting pants on his arms. 

I gave Eve an ornament with tiny books that she's read. "A tiny Overstory with a tiny Pulitzer Prize label on it!" she squealed. She's not sure she can leave them in the ornament.

Angus was an Eagle with purple team colours in high school AND undergrad, so my friend Sasha (HI SASHA) crocheted him an amazing purple eagle ornament. He was very impressed.

I told Matt I hadn't found anything good for him and he said that was fine, we wouldn't do gifts for each other, and then the sonofabitch bought me a new food processor (the one I have now we got for a wedding present and the buttons don't work, I just have to plug it in to make it go and unplug it to make it stop) and an ice maker, which I almost bought myself during lockdown but didn't because it seemed too self-indulgent (ever since I had the kids I only like water icy cold, and our fridge ice maker stopped working and is too expensive to fix). So I had to say thank-you AND fuck off. 

We usually get up by 8:30 Christmas morning, but I woke up feeling weirdly well-rested and it was TEN and no one was up yet. We made tea and settled in our accustomed places and it was perfect, and then we went to my parents' place for breakfast and then I didn't even need a nap before dinner. 

This is all reading very dully in a "all happy families are happy in the same way". It would be more entertaining if someone had a fight over politics or threw their present across the room. Oh well, I know you all read quickly. I've always been aware of how precarious our joyful family gatherings have been, and since we lost Matt's grandparents and mom and my parents are in their 80s, it all takes on a bittersweet glow. My deep sympathy to people struggling with loss and sadness at this time of year.

Angus got me a 1000-piece puzzle and for the first time wanted to do it with me. It's very funny to watch someone who's never done a puzzle - the rapid alterations between bafflement, rage, and exuberance. 

I am trying very hard not to descend into after-Christmas depression. The snot production and dreary weather are not helping, but the family-movie-watching and reading and puzzling is. 

Vision of Salted Toffee Pretzel Bark Dancing in Your Head

There was at least one request for this in the comments and a couple from Facebook. You're welcome in advance, everyone. I would like to take credit for making this recipe up, but all I did was think "man, chocolate bark would be great with pretzels in it - I'll bet someone is already on that" and google "chocolate pretzel bark".

*trumpet fanfare*...... The Recipe.

Oh, while I'm here, I totally did say fuck it and blow off all my remaining Christmas responsibilities to go to the Christmas market with Eve's BFF and her mom who is now my BFF. Mother-daughter double date (plus Piper in her Santa wrap) for the extreme win. It was cold and clear and magical and we sampled Vodkow and drank hot cider and bought a few Christmas presents and marveled at the beauty of a thousand tiny lights in the winter darkness. Davis wasn't there to sing the opening of All I Want for Christmas for the radio people this year, but she joined us afterwards at Marianna's house (you might think they're jumping for joy to see each other after months apart, but it's actually delirious excitement at Eve and Marianna having seen Francesca from Too Hot to Handle at the market- I know. I mean, I don't know.)

Pre-Christmas Round-Up

 I didn't feel like I had time to clean my bedroom this morning. I don't feel like I have time to blog right now. But both of those things make me feel happy and slightly accomplished, so here we are. 

I have written and sent 43 Christmas cards and have four more to deliver locally, and I believe it is time to call it done and clean the Christmas-card-carnage off the kitchen table. I did do a card and a five-page letter for Matt's aunt who I didn't get to last Christmas, and all year I told myself "just do it now" and somehow couldn't. She is Matt's Nana's younger sister and when I met her at Nana's funeral she knew everything about me being a librarian and the kids and she is smart and funny and I do really want to keep in touch with her, especially with my mother-in-law gone now (fuck cancer). I already got a reply from her, so that was lovely. 

Sarah's card is so perfect and wonderful it makes me feel like an absolute chump for only having two kids and not living in Wisconsin (I want us to meet IRL too Sarah BUT HOW I AM CANADIAN). Nicole's card was early and lovely as usual. I need to exchange more blog cards next year. My card stocking seemed to take a bit longer to fill but is nicely rounded out at this point. I keep a list of everyone I've sent cards to but I forget pretty quickly who the earliest ones went out to, so Matt had dinner with his old thesis adviser in Hamilton last night and said they said thanks for the Christmas card and I was like "I sent them one? Huh, go me." 

I haven't baked as much because of stupid work - toffee shortbread, Chai shortbread (Eve's favourites), a couple of pans of bark that I sent to work with Matt and brought to the Christmas party and fed to book club which I hosted on Monday, gingerbread cookies with lemon glaze and cream wafers (and yes, I made the same mistake I always do with the first batch and didn't roll the dough thin enough, so once the cookies are sandwiched with filling they are delicious but horrifyingly tall and hard to fit in your mouth). That's probably enough, to be honest, but somehow it feels inadequate not to bake to excess. 

The oven was briefly inoperational - flashing an error code and locked with no buttons functioning - on December 18th. Somewhat uncharacteristically, I didn't freak out, and managed to get a service visit booked the next day. Then Matt came home mid-book-club and fixed it by doing THE EXACT SAME THING I HAD. There was a fairly good joke about weighing the pleasure in the oven being fixed against the rage of a man fixing it solely by repeating my actions, but at this time of year? The good far outweighed the bad. Today I'm going to make another pan of bark and dough for lemon shortbread and maybe brown sugar cookies. 

Eve wrote her last exam this morning (Solstice Exam!) and is on her way home with Matt. She said her friends want to go to the Christmas market which we did a few years ago and it was magical, so I might just say fuck it and abandon everything I was going to do tonight and go with them. (Photo dump for Christmas market in 2019 before all the children left us for stupid growth and independence and personal fulfillment reasons)

The Christmas party was amazing as usual, but sort of unusually I was in the mood for a party even beforehand, and didn't hate everything about how I looked and was excited to go. If Cosmic Irony was being an especial dick that night, this would have meant that the party itself was a dud, but it was not. There were old people and young people and it feels kind of special to have the young people still be happy to hang out with the old people. There were enough people that the house felt full and loud and happy and fun but not so many that it felt claustrophobic (I have a memory of Collette and I standing on the back deck having a heartwarming conversation and looking in at our kids and marveling at how life is so strange and magical, but I don't know why we were outside. I mean, I assume I was too hot, but she wouldn't have been. I asked her and she doesn't remember either). 

The Epic Annual Steal-a-Gift Game was, as is traditional, Epic. We used to have the kids do a gift exchange and then send them downstairs or upstairs to watch tv or whatever while we did the steal-a-gift game, but at this point they're all old enough to participate in the ungovernable hilarious debauchery, spite and vindictiveness. Generally the booze and weed is the most hotly fought-over (no sex toys this year - yes, we are terrible), but this year it was, perplexingly (or maybe not), a hooded fuzzy blanket - it didn't quite reach the fever pitch of '22 when everyone was conspiring to deny Collette the spatula she wanted, but it was close. When it was my turn someone told me to steal the blanket and I said I didn't want it and they said no, it's strategy, everyone else wants it and it positions you to get something better. I did it, but I didn't even like touching it - so hot. The game took from 7:07 until 9:11 (I took screenshots of the time when someone said at the beginning "this is going to take three hours". It was hugely entertaining and we were all friends again afterwards. (Photo dump for Christmas party and steal-a-gift game - I take all the pictures and forget to be in any, so I took a picture of my sparkly gold dress in which the sparkle doesn't really come across but trust me - sparkly).

"Everybody throw things at Michael!"

And look who got home and showed up at the party just in time!

I keep thinking it's the 22nd and we only have one day to decorate the tree, do the Christmas photo shoot, wrap presents and get ready for Christmas Eve which we host here - I just do appetizers and it's only my parents because my sister's family is coming for New Year's this year instead, if the good lord is willing and the creek etc. etc. But it's the 21st so I....still probably don't have enough time, but I always tell other people "Do what you can and let the rest go" and even thought I am VERY BAD AT FOLLOWING MY OWN ADVICE I'm going to try. 

Well, this took a lot of the day between baking and cleaning up and wrapping (a little. A very little). 

Bark!

I wish everyone all the family wonderfulness and terrible blanket-stealing friends and flour-dusted paper-strewn mess and lights in the darkness and anything else you wish for.