Christmas 2021

I came home from work on Christmas Eve and a glass of boozy eggnog was put in my hand before my purse was even down. My mother was in the kitchen, peeling carrots in a way that said she had just heard my car pull up and had run into the kitchen to look busy. Her phone rang, so I got her a drink refill and sent her to the couch while I took over. The pies were done, the roast was in the oven, and I just had to finish the sides while everyone came through the kitchen to grab snitches and talk. This was much better than carding people at the library.

Everything was pretty good until Mike sent the kids downstairs to find the stockings, and Leif came back up with a strange look on his face. The boxes that were waiting for Santa had accidentally been put in the basement instead of the studio, and I worried he might have gotten into one of them. Maybe it was time to have the talk with him about the nature of magic and how it's made. I watched him for signs of a conversational opening, but instead of seeming disappointed, he started coming around and giving me very tight and happy hugs. I think he knows, and maybe it feels like love to him, because it is.

Christmas morning came at 5:00 am on the dot, because the kids wake up at 1:00 am and stare at the clock until then. People talk about kids who sleep until the sun comes up on Christmas Day, but I have never met those things. My kids jump on my chest and shake me if I don't get up by 5:00:30, if the cats don't do it first.

For Zenny, this was the year of the cat-proof dollhouse. Her old dollhouse was a thrift store find, made from cheap craft wood and half destroyed by the cats sitting on top of it. The new one is solid wood and weighs as much as a table. There was no way to hide it, so I taped together a giant box to put over it and wrapped it in three layers of paper to keep it from being torn open before Christmas. If the cats want to ruin this one, they are going to have to learn how to swing an ax. 

Which is looking like a possibility, because Gavin got an ax.

Leif found a pair of knife-proof food prep gloves in his stocking, and laughed a lot at the "don't try cutting your arms off, the gloves only cover your hands" instructions in the booklet they came with.

In the afternoon, we packed up all the food and went to my mother's house for the Christmas meat pie and flaming plum pudding. This year we brought the toxic rum, and the pudding exploded and took off my mother's knuckle hair. A+ holiday entertainment.

While putting on a fireplace video, I dropped the tv remote behind the couch and then crushed my toe flat like Wile E Coyote while trying to find it. Ended up stuck in an armchair with an ice pack wrapped around my foot. My aunt's semi-estranged husband was visiting from the mainland. He is not allowed in my house because I'm still mad at him for unplugging my internet after I drank a cup of his ginger ale in 2001*, but my mother's house is neutral ground, and he was on his best behavior. Such good behavior that Zenny, who hadn't met him before, mistook his smiles and Santa-like belly for trustworthiness and climbed on his lap for tickles and knee-bounces. I was smiling politely and about to kick my ice pack into his face when Mike figured out what was going on and diverted Zenny upstairs with a video game. 

Overall, good Christmas, zero manslaughter.

 

Gavin and his best girl

the tiny portraits of Noodle the Pug that I painted for Zenny's dollhouse

Zenny in her elf pajamas 

peonies, hard to find here

Droopy, not eating my peonies

 

gifts from the chickens

brie and panettone was a winning combination

fire in the hole

I didn't make it to the pie in time to get a good picture

foods and family

damn it

Merry Christmas, everyone.

* and for refusing to help her move furniture because I called him a hamster while they were dating, and for punching a hole in the wall over my baby cousin because he wouldn't stay still for a diaper change, and for mortgaging her house for a failed business so that she has to live in a shitty apartment now, and for getting weird about guns and scaring them so much the kids hid in the closet, etc. The ginger ale thing was just the dumbest. It wasn't even his; someone at his church gave him a leftover bottle of generic soda, which he put in the fridge next to my bottle of generic soda, and I opened his before realizing it was the wrong one, and he came out in full outrage because he heard the psssshh of the bottle opening. gtfo.