We put Christmas away tonight. We packed it all up in plastic bins, nestling ornaments carefully in divided layers so they won’t be crushed; arranging and rearranging boxes of cards and wreaths and garlands and various other decorations so that somehow, some way, despite there being more of everything this year, they all fit into the same space.

The wall above the fireplace is empty and far too white. The mantel looks shrunken; the shelves – despite being full of books – look bare. The tree still stand, listing severely to one side in its container, but it has been given only a temporary respite. Come trash day on Friday morning it, too, will disappear, and in the meantime it looks lonely, stripped of baubles and sparkles and lights.

There are still bits and pieces of Christmas that remain. After all, putting Christmas away is never a one-day affair. This weekend or next Richard will climb on the roof and take down all the outdoor lights while I carefully wind up the indoor ones and store away all the suction cup hangers and gutter hooks for another year. There is the inevitable cluster of broken ornaments that require either some careful application of super glue, or for enough time to pass until we finally give up and just throw them away. And even when this is all done, days will pass before all the last bits of Christmas are found and put away.

Even so, there is a sense of relief. I have been ready to put Christmas away earlier than usual this year. It’s not that there was any particular reason – as holiday seasons go this was one of the good ones. I had simply reached the end of my appreciation for it all. It is as if only once Christmas is all packed up can I feel as if I can truly start a new year. And it is also because sometimes all I truly need is for everything – no matter how sparkly and colorful and lovely it might have been – to just go back to normal.

Last night we had my parents over for dinner. I dashed home from work and swung by the produce stand on the way home to pick up a huge bag of green beans, and then tossed two heads of garlic into the oven and got the brown rice started on the stove and stood there and snapped green beans, and somehow managed to get everything mostly set up or ready by the time they arrived. Richard came home later and started the steaks that, despite being in the fridge all day, were still mostly frozen. Regardless of that setback, they turned out fine – perfectly cooked, and when slathered with roasted garlic they were delicious. It amuses me that due to our spontaneous order of Omaha Steaks, and the antelope I consumed on New Year’s Eve, I have eaten more red meat in the past few weeks then I had the entire year. In fact I think perhaps the last time I had a steak was when we were in Chicago for the training for Benthic Creatures, and that was more than a year ago. I don’t deliberately avoid red meat; it’s just that I usually prefer fish or chicken, or no meat at all. And yet the steaks for dinner were my idea last night. Go figure.

Today was not nearly as lazy a day as Thursday, but still we managed to finish off the rest of season 1 of Angel. We also cleared out the guest room that, because it is where the wrapping paper lives, had become a sort of mini catastrophe zone by the time Christmas rolled around. Richard gathered up boxes and deflated all those little plastic packing bags (Amazon always stuffs at least half a dozen in each box) while I grabbed my gardening shears and tackled the bushes on the side yard. The bushes for what will eventually be our ‘fence’ are box hedges and they grow sooo slowly. But they can be shaped perfectly and eventually they will look nice and I keep reminding myself that this is why we chose box hedges every time I compare them to the other bushes – the ones on the side yard that grow about half a foot a month (or at least it seems that way sometimes) and refuse to be kept in line. I hacked down probably about three or four feet worth of bush parts off that side yard, and this is not the first time I have had to do that since we planted them. Compare that to the little box hedges, which are finally now tall enough that it’s easier to go through the gate instead of just stepping over them. They’ll probably take another two years at least before they are anything as definite as a ‘fence’, and in the meantime I will most likely have hacked down a few fences worth of excess foliage in those other darn bushes. Next time I am going to plan this better. Box hedges all around is sounding better and better every time I have to drag out the clippers.

Today we managed to take care of another chore we’ve been putting off and putting off, much like trimming those darn bushes. When we moved in we started out with several extra house keys. But eventually they were all dispersed to the various people who needed access to our house (mainly to take care of our cats). When we started the cleaning service a few months ago, Richard gave them his house key, and when we hired the pet sitter for the Christmas trip, the only house key we had left was the one on my key ring. So for about three weeks now we have had no way to get into our house at all except through the garage. And I have been expecting a rather rousing dose of Murphy’s Law any day now regarding this distinct lack of keys.

However, somehow Murphy was apparently not paying attention. The pet sitter swung by to drop off our key, so we promptly zipped off to the local hardware store and made an extra three copies. It occurs to me right now that I have no idea where Richard put those extra copies, but we did at least make sure that they work, and at least now we each have the ability to get into our own house if something ever happens to the garage door opener. This may not be very exciting in the grand scheme of things, but I figure if nothing else, the ability to avoid getting locked out of my own house is at least worth noting as a good thing.

We did not watch the stupid ball drop in Times Square, and we did not really do any sort of toasting at all, but it was still a nice New Year’s Eve. I left work a little early so I could get home in time to change before we had to head back to Sacramento for dinner. I tried not to eat much for lunch and neither did Richard, but even if we’d not eaten the entire day previous, I still think we wouldn’t have managed to finish dinner. It was an amazing amount of food.

The restaurant is one of our favorites anyway, and last night they outdid themselves. We started with heirloom squash and chestnut soup with just a hint of peppery kick. I am not a squash fan so had been unsure of this soup, but it was divine, and if I can ever track down the recipe I will be such a happy camper. Then they brought us a selection of sausages and some lobster spring rolls, and once we’d savored those tidbits we moved on to huge spinach salads with candied pecans. There was a tiny dish of passion fruit sorbet between salad and the main course – filet of beef and antelope – and then, finally, there was dessert – intensely chocolate mouse smothered with an orange glaze, or praline cheesecake with hazelnuts and vanilla bean gelato. And at the end, when we had to reluctantly push away more than half our desserts and were sure we could not possibly fit in another bite, they brought us tiny chocolates filled with a passion fruit crème that we simply could not pass up.

After dinner we wandered Old Sacramento for a little bit, then ended up finding a place to sit so we could just watch the people walk by. There were hundreds of people milling around, wearing flashing earrings and necklaces or glittery hats, and blowing on horns or rattling noisemakers. At one point a woman came by shaking hands, followed by a man with a video camera; turns out it was the mayor of Sacramento. And eventually we joined the slowly growing crowd of people standing near the river, just in time to see fireworks show, which was short but spectacular, especially the finale.

After the fireworks we headed home. I took a short nap (or tried – the cats didn’t really let me), and then we curled up on the futon downstairs with cookies and ice cream and ushered in the new year with the first disk in season 1 of Angel. About twenty minutes after midnight Richard looked over at me and wished me a happy new year, and I blinked, realized that midnight was past, and did the same. And then we stayed up for another three hours until we’d finished the first four episodes and decided that the show was starting to grow on us, before we finally could no longer keep our eyes open and crawled into bed.

Today has been such a lovely lazy day. I got up early to feed the cats since they refuse to let me sleep late, and then couldn’t get back to sleep. So finally I went downstairs and curled up on the futon under blankets, where I was promptly swarmed by four of the cats, and that is where Richard found me when he came down a little later. We ended up watching more episodes of Angel and eating a few leftover cookies from our New Year’s Eve ‘feast’ until early afternoon, at which point I finally decided that no matter what the cats wanted, I didn’t think I could lie in one place all day just so they could be comfortable. So instead of playing cat bed, we decided to go out and hit the outlet stores because we both were in need of new pants.

I was fully expecting to see crowds, since it’s a day off for most people, but the outlet stores were practically empty. In a place where you usually have to circle once or twice to find a parking spot it was bizarre to be able to park right next to each store we wanted to visit. I guess everyone was staying home, either sleeping off the excesses of last night or watching the game or the parade. Whatever the reason, it was nice to be able to browse at our leisure without having to jostle through crowds. We went to the fabric store to snag some boxes for ornaments and lights (since they were on an incredible sale) and I managed to not even go near the yarn aisle at all, and then we ate lunch and came home and watched more Angel and let more cats sit on us and that pretty much sums up the rest of the day.

I talked Richard into opening his main birthday present early because I knew he would want it for the trip to and from Seattle (a 30-GB mp3 player), and since that and Christmas kind of wiped out the rest of my budget for gifts, I didn’t really have much else to give him (also the mp3 player was sort of a ‘big’ gift anyway). While we were at Fry’s this past weekend I bought him the software to learn Mandarin, which I told him I would wrap for him even though he knew about it, but he ended up opening up the box and installing it before I could even wrap it. So this morning, faced with the fact that he has received every single one of his gifts early, I grabbed something he already owns and wrapped it deliberately messy, with a whole lot of extra tape, and then I woke him up by yelling “Happy Birthday” at him and made him open it. Unfortunately he was a little too groggy to fully appreciate the humor at the time; it wasn’t until we were sitting in the little bakery about an hour or so later, eating breakfast, that he started to laugh about what I’d done. So that was my final birthday present to him, I suppose – a way to start the day with a laugh.

He has the day off today from work, lucky him, but I had to come into work. It’s quiet in the office since people are still off on vacation, and it is hard to focus on work when I can look outside at the river and the pretty day and it just reminds me that if I was home we could go do something fun together like go for a bike ride or even just a walk before the weather turns on us again. But that isn’t really going to happen today, so instead I am focusing on tonight, when we will dress up in pretty clothes and go to our favorite restaurant in Old Sacramento and eat far too much marvelous food and wander around all the stores and see how they are decorated for the holidays, and then watch the fireworks over the river. We did not bring any leftover Christmas cookies home with us which sort of defeats the whole idea of toasting in the new year with leftover cookies, but there is ice cream in the freezer if we feel the need, and I will mull a pot of cider, and maybe I might even swing by the store and buy a package of those silly poppers that explode in showers of confetti and tiny paper streamers, just so we can set those off at midnight and confuse the cats and make noise and be as goofy and silly as we want to be because we might as well end the day (and the year) as we started it – with a laugh.

Happy 36th Birthday to my favorite guy. Happy New Year to everyone else.

After all the wildness of the weather yesterday it was a bit odd to wake this morning to relative quiet outside, and to drive to work with the sun actually daring to show itself from behind the clouds. All through the day we would occasionally glance wistfully outside at the beautiful, perfect day – the river so blissfully calm and the sky so blue. Why couldn’t this nice weather come on Thursday, when we have the day off from work and can take advantage of it? Instead there is more rain predicted for New Year’s Day – and while I fully intend to be as lazy as possible that day I had pondered the idea of taking a short bike ride in the morning, just to kick the year off on the right foot. Ah well.

I have been having fun at work these past two days since my boss gave me more things to build in the database – things that required some marvelously long bits of code to write, so as to execute all the appropriate functionality. There were times I just had to stop and stare at the table structures for a while, or scribble random things on paper in order to try to figure out exactly how to make it all work, and a few of the pieces had my brain spinning ever so slightly, and it could have been a lot more complicated except that my boss decided at the last minute to make a tiny change that made it all so much simpler. Plus there was a brief discussion in the morning on what-if’s, having to do with huge piles of data that currently live in spreadsheets, and whether it might be easier to manipulate them in their current location or pull them into Access. I sense more code writing in my future. I love this job.

Richard’s parents came up to take us out to dinner for Richard’s birthday. We went to Chevy’s, where we all made very sure to inform the waitress that it was his birthday so they would come and put a sombrero on his head and sing (loudly and off key) to him at the end of dinner. Because, really, what better way to show the true depths of your love for someone than to dress him up and laugh at him?

And then after dinner we came back home so he could open his presents and so we could all laugh at Allegra, who was working herself into a fine snit and was randomly either telling us all off, or reaching out a paw to smack whoever was closest on the head. She wasn’t using claws, at least, which is rather restrained for her when she is in full snit mode. I think it helped that Richard’s presents came with a large paper-filled box, into which she promptly settled, still grumbling at the world in general even as she burrowed into the paper.

The rain did not wake me up last night, although I am not exactly sure why. It certainly should have, what with how hard it was coming down, but perhaps the wind drowned out the noise. Driving to work this morning was a challenge – one that reminded me of why it is that sometimes having a larger car is a good thing. Or rather, having a larger car that is not also tall is a good thing; those people driving SUV’s and those strange boxy Elements probably were hating life the entire time they fought their way across the causeway. It was the kind of wind that has me hanging onto the steering wheel with both hands because I know if I raise one even for an instant, the wind will shove me out of my lane.

By the time I got to work, it had only gotten worse. The wind howled and the rain fell pretty much all day. There were times it would start to gust so hard we could not help but stop what we were doing to stare out the windows. It blew in the opposite direction of the natural flow of the river just outside my office, to the point that the normally calm river was just a seething mass of swells and waves, with the occasional floating tree. It was actually, at times, rather exciting to watch, although none of us in the office really wanted to be out in it. Weather wimps that we are, we all decided to have pizza delivered than to try to go somewhere to get lunch and bring it back. I felt sorry for the poor pizza delivery guy as he wooshed in the door, assisted by a particularly insistent gust of wind, and then just as quickly was sucked back out again, minus a few boxes of warm cheesy goodness.

It was still going strong in Sacramento when I left, but luckily by the time I got home it was starting to calm. The road home, much to my surprise, was not even the slightest bit flooded, although apparently parts of the town did lose power. We went and got dinner at a Chinese food place in town, and then came home and put in the last DVD in the season 5 Buffy set and watched every remaining episode. Now that they are all done, I am feeling faintly adrift. It’s not as if we don’t have plenty of things left to watch – there is the season of Firefly, and the first season of Angel, and this does not even include the current offerings from NetFlix, one of which might even be another few episodes from Star Trek: The Next Generation. But what I really want to watch next is more Buffy. I want the last two seasons to be released, preferably within the next few weeks, and then once I have watched every last episode in the remaining two seasons, we can start back at the beginning again

After church today, standing in the social hall drinking coffee, one of the other pianists came up to me to tell me I’d done well. And then she added with a grin “The rest of us were just glad we weren’t you today.”

I know exactly what she meant, of course. Today was the day the minister decided to do a thing on the 12 Days of Christmas, which somehow translated into me having to play 11 hymns. Toss in a prelude, a postlude, and an offertory, and I was facing one heck of a lot of songs to muddle through. It didn’t help that I was out of town for the past four days and even though I did spend a few hours practicing them before we left, I was sounding a bit rusty as of last night. Toss in the added bonus of finding out that the hymn numbers had been mixed up so I hadn’t even practiced one of the ones I was supposed to play, plus oh, did someone forget to mention there was that little song for the lighting of the advent candle, and it was just one big barrel of fun!

Actually, it wasn’t as bad as I am making it sound. Sight-reading has never been my strong suit, but oh boy is this accompanist thing forcing me to work on that! I’ve been picking up on all the little tricks – how if you can’t play all the notes, you make sure that you at least play the bass note and the melody, and if you can toss in a few extra harmony notes with the right hand, you’re pretty much golden.

It was a pretty musical morning, even without the fact that I was playing the piano for most of it. A friend and I sung a duet (where if the rest of the congregation had no idea just how low I can sing, they got a really great chance to hear it), and then those of us in the choir who were there (which basically was only five of us) did a rather hasty rehearsal before the service in order to prepare for the two songs we did during the 12 Days of Christmas thing. Since the choir accompanist is out of town, that meant we did those acapella, which was actually pretty fun, even if I did have to keep switching between alto and tenor because we didn’t have enough people otherwise to cover all the notes.

After the musical interlude that was my morning, Richard and I drove off to Sacramento to go to Fry’s. I needed to get an extension USB cable for my dad and Richard wanted a USB hub for his laptop and while we were there we found a birthday present for Richard. On the way home we stopped off at Walmart because someone told me they’d found this thing that I cannot name because I want to get it for my mom for her birthday and she reads this occasionally. But they did not have one, so we settled for toothpaste instead. Plus as we were in the parking lot we saw the cutest little spotted brown owl just sitting happily in one of the little tree islands between the cars, and we also discovered a new Mongolian Barbeque restaurant, to which we promptly went for lunch.

The rest of the day has been lazy, lazy, lazy. We pretty much camped out on the futon downstairs and watched season 5 Buffy, while either knitting (me), poking on the laptop (Richard) or trying very hard to get in the way of either (the cats). Ah, such a nice way to end a weekend.

It is a firm and fast tradition in my family that the day after Christmas, my mom and my sisters get up ungodly early and hit the after-Christmas sales. Normally most of us are not hard-core shoppers, but for this we are willing to deal with the combat shopping, if only to score all the stuff we need for the following year. This year we ended up doing things a little differently. Richard and I and my little sister and her husband all got up ungodly early and drove for a very long time to go to a huge nursery called Molbacks, which also sells all manner of gorgeous home decorations. We sat in the car for a while since we got there too early but eventually slipped and slid our way across the icy parking lot to the Starbucks across the street for some desperately needed caffeine. Then we got into line and joined the throngs of people who poured into the store to ransack the rather impressive remains of their Christmas stock.

It’s hard doing combat shopping when you’ve only got limited room in your suitcase, but nevertheless, Richard and I managed quite well. We found all sorts of marvelously silly Christmas cards, and there were some adorable ornaments for next year’s stocking stuffers, and a gorgeous nativity scene that is all one piece and looked sturdy enough to withstand feline intervention. And in the meantime (or at least during the car ride there and back, and during the side trip to get coffee), we got a chance to chat with my little sister and her husband, just the four of us. Considering I don’t get a chance to see them very often, it was a nice bonus.

We met the rest of the family at a restaurant for lunch (they’d decided to actually forgo the early morning combat shopping), and then once the kids were down for their naps, my mom and sisters and I set off again, but this time to the fabric store.

I think if I’d been back home I might have had a problem resisting all the cute things, but I kept whispering ‘suitcase space’ to myself and avoided buying anything. Well, okay, that wasn’t technically accurate. I did succumb to the urge to go visit the yarn aisle, and after perusing a few pattern books I ended up buying two skeins of gorgeous soft yarn and a new pair of large circular needles to make scarves. In my defense, one of the scarves will be for me.

I did better than the rest of them, I think, since after I’d finally broken down and picked out yarn and needles, I found the rest of my female relatives pondering lace and flannel, and eventually enough fabric was cut to make a whole plethora of flannel pajamas for all three of the kids. When we all finally escaped that store we ended up meandering around Target until my cell phone rang and we realized it was time for the shopping to end.

Then it was back to my little sister’s house for a dinner of all the leftovers from Christmas, plus more cookies and more candy and more laughing and knitting (As an aside, note the picture by this paragraph – every single one of those tins was full of cookies). At one point we lured all the kids downstairs to the family room and left them, slack-jawed, in front of the television watching Veggie Tales Silly Songs DVD while we adults crowded around the kitchen table. Out came the cards, those husbands who are still a bit unfamiliar with the game (like Richard) were given extremely hasty tutorials, and the annual family game of Nerts commenced. It’s a wild and raucous sort of game, where speed is of the essence, and since we were playing in pairs there was a lot of hollers between partners as hands would grab for the same cards, Cards flew across the table and more than once we all broke down laughing so hard most of us were red-faced and crying. The kids, I am sure, thought we were all just a little bit insane, and to be honest they were probably right, but it didn’t matter. It was a lovely way to end the evening, even though that hadn’t been the original end in mind – there was a movie and we were all going to go downstairs and watch it, but by that time I was starting to feel queasy again so Richard and I regretfully headed back to the hotel so I could crash for the night.

That brings us to this morning, where we woke up to discover that sometime last night it snowed, just barely enough to cover the grass and cars with a fine layer of frost. It was enough to get the kids excited though, and I took complete advantage of the situation. We got them into their coats and boots and then we slapped those goofy hats I made onto their heads and let them loose in the yard to run around and laugh and play and enjoy the beautiful day.

At one point my younger brother-in-law scraped enough of the snow off the cars to form snowballs, which he doled out to eager little hands to fling at the rest of us. I think the kids would have been perfectly content to stay outside and romp through the frosty yard for hours, but eventually we adults got too cold and ushered them back inside with promises of stories and hot chocolate (and of course more play time with silly plastic lizards and make-believe insects).

Richard and I hugged our goodbyes and then my brother-in-law drove us to the airport, where we joined the huge lines of people who were also headed home from the holidays. The plane home was just as full as the one we took earlier in the week, but the ride was smooth and it landed on time, and Richard’s parents met us at the airport and drove us back to their house, where we sat around and talked for a bit and played with their cat and dogs before finally loading up our car with all our luggage and presents and heading home.

The cats have been milling around, wanting to make sure we remain in eyesight at all times. There is a huge stack of mail to wade through, and I still have yet to sit down and do an hour or two of practicing on the piano, since I’m supposed to be the accompanist tomorrow at church. I have a feeling we’ll be up late tonight, and that the cats will do their best to prevent me from getting much sleep at all. But that’s okay. We had a fun Christmas and it was lovely to spend all that time with all that family, but it is just as lovely to be, finally, home.

Tuesday night we drove down to Richard’s parents’ house to start the holiday festivities. After we’d had a chance to bring in our luggage and presents, and just as they tantalized me with a copy of one of the worst of those cheesy newspapers you see at checkout lines, we all piled into the car to go look at lights. It was hard to leave this particular cheesy tabloid behind, but that was because on the front cover there were ‘exclusive’ pictures from Osama and Saddam’s gay love nest (yes, my thoughts exactly), and even better, a huge two-page spread on how scientists have found garden gnomes and plastic flamingos on the moon. I think the highlight of that article came near the end when a scientist was quoted (anonymously, of course) as being disgruntled about the discovery because they were ‘making our solar system look tacky’.

Anyway, lights. We went to look at lights in this one part where they do it up huge every year. Except that apparently we picked the same night every one else in the surrounding three counties decided to see the lights as well and the traffic getting into the park was horrendous. We wiled away the time yelling out the names of the stores as we inched our way past them, and occasionally dancing in the seats. Yeah, I fit into this family far too well.

Wednesday was a nice and mostly lazy day. Everyone got up as they felt like it, and we all lounged around in the living room drinking coffee and talking (or in my case, not so much talking – since my voice still wasn’t at its best – as knitting). Richard and his sister painted cookies – a task I have taken part in before but decided against this year due to being sick. Eventually Richard’s older sister and her fiancé showed up so we could eat lunch and get busy with the opening of presents.

The preceding years we’ve done the Christmas Eve festivities in the evening, and it’s tended to be rushed. Plus it meant that after dinner and presents and everything else, Richard and I never got home much before 1 or 2 in the morning, meaning we were more likely to be tired and grouchy the next day. This year things were so much more relaxed and I think we all felt like we got more time to just sit and talk and enjoy being together.

Before we were ready, it was time to head for the airport. Richard’s parents very nicely volunteered to drive us so we wouldn’t have to deal with finding parking for the car, and we got there with plenty of time to spare. Then it was on to the extremely full plane, where I got to remind myself how much fun it isn’t to fly with clogged sinuses, and then we were landing in Seattle. The original plan had been to go directly to my little sister’s house, but by the time we’d landed, my head was hurting and I was feeling pretty lousy. I love my sinuses. Really I do. I am sure of it. So my brother-in-law took us directly to our hotel instead, where we checked in, climbed the stairs to our room, figured out how to turn on the heat, plugged in the laptop and checked our email (because lousy feeling or not, I am still a nerd) and then finally went to sleep.

Because there were three very small people under the age of 6 at my little sister’s house, my parents and we had to get up and get there fairly early. The kids were surprisingly patient, considering that there were stockings hanging with candy canes peeking out the tops, and piles of presents under the tree. But finally everyone was ready and stockings were emptied, and frankly, if it were up to my niece and my oldest nephew we could have stopped there, because the highlight toy of the season were these silly plastic lizards with tongues that stuck out when you squeezed them. And for the rest of the time we were in Seattle, they amused themselves for hours chasing each other around the house, having their silly plastic lizards eat invisible mosquitoes and flies.

All three of the kids are old enough now to have fun with Christmas. My oldest nephew (who is 5) is quite the good reader, so he got a lot of books. The niece, who will be four next month, got a train set which drew excitement from all three of the kids. And the nutcrackers that my dad brought back from Germany made a huge hit – at least with the two older kids. And it was fun to watch all of them – to see their excitement with each package, and to see that they were all able to watch other people opening presents and get excited about those as well.

The rest of the day was spent being comfortably lazy. I sat on the couch and knit, or read books. Everyone else talked or read or napped. Eventually we all crowded around the dinner table for the wonderful dinner my little sister cooked, and ate until we were all far too full. Then more sitting around, stuffed and sleepy and still having fun watching the kids play with their lizards, or my nephew’s new walkie talkies, or the train set, until those of us in the hotel headed back to try to get some sleep in preparation for the after-Christmas combat shopping the next morning.

Christmas is almost over and there is so much over the past few days I want to talk about. Mostly it is family stuff – both families, but there are some other things to mention. So I will start with those, tonight, while I’m still awake enough to get them down, and deal with the rest later.

The hats: I was prepared to be stopped at the airport security gate and told I’d have to give up my knitting needles (because technically I suppose they could count as sharp objects). In preparation for this I had printed out the sheet from the TSA website where it says that they are, in fact, allowed. To my disappointment, they did not even blink an eye at the knitting needles – although the tins of cookies in the smaller suitcase caught the attention of the scanner and it had to be tested for explosives. I suppose seeing two large round metallic objects in a suitcase could be disconcerting.

Because the first two hats I made were too small, and then because I’d been so sick, I only managed to get one of the ‘final’ hats finished before we left for Richard’s parents’ house on Tuesday night. Luckily they didn’t seem to mind me knitting while I was there, so the second hat was started and finished by lunchtime on Wednesday. And the third hat I started at the airport as we waited to board our plane, and was not finished until this afternoon, after all the presents were opened and we adults were sitting around in a cinnamon bun-induced stupor while the kids chased each other around the house with little plastic lizards who would stick out their tongues if you squeezed them. And amusingly, the final hat I made – which is just a little loose on my oldest nephew’s head – fits me perfectly.

It felt odd, later, not to have any more knitting to do. It made me wish I’d purchased yarn for the sweater I want to make for myself, so I could have at least started on that. Oh, and speaking of sweaters, that cute little blue sweater I made for my nephew fit just fine – with one teensy exception. It will not go over his head! Somehow, even though I followed the directions, the neck opening is just too small, and I’m honestly not sure there is any way to fix it. I’m not upset about it – after all, the sweater was just for fun and it can always be used to clothe a large teddy bear – but I do wonder how I managed to screw it up. I sense more knitting lessons in my future as a result. At least all three hats fit fine – although I imagine it’s a bit harder to screw up a hat than it is to screw up a sweater. At least that’s the theory I am sticking to.

The food: Despite trying to divvy up the cookie baking so no one would have to do it all, we ended up having enough cookies to feed a small third-world country for a few weeks. My little sister went a bit gung-ho with baking, apparently, since there were boxes and boxes and boxes of cookies – almond teacakes, anise shortbreads, pfefferneuse, chocolate crinkles, and on and on. It did not help matters any that she had the kids make a train cake for dessert – fashioned out of two pound cakes iced and then covered liberally in various store-bought cookies. Plus there was the fudge, and the box of homemade candies that comes yearly from a friend of my mom’s, and bowls of M&M’s, and some kind of sugary sweet everywhere we turned.

Since my sister and her family are vegetarians, we did not have the usual Christmas meatloaf. Instead we had a pretend meatloaf – made from the Boca crumbles – which was actually quite good. And again, my sister went all out. I think she saw an excuse to try out a bunch of recipes on a crowd and went a little crazy. There were brussel sprouts with chestnuts (delicious, but then I love brussel sprouts). There was mashed potatoes with roasted garlic, Yorkshire pudding, stuffing with onions and apples, and we started the meal with an incredible potato and cauliflower cheese soup spiced with just a tinge of curry. The only ‘traditional’ dish at the meal was the green bean casserole. I think we all ate until we were far too full, and I’ve a mental list of which recipes I want her to give to me (like that soup!).

More later – probably in tomorrow’s entry. I am pleasantly full of far too much good food, and far too many cookies. For the first time in over a week I can breathe normally and my sinuses are (mostly) behaving. Our hotel room is warm and I’m a little tired and hoping that, unlike last night, I might actually be able to sleep. And I am, rather pathetically, wondering most of all whether we might be able to find a yarn store at some point while we’re out tomorrow doing the after Christmas shopping because if I cannot work on sweaters, at least I could possibly be making more hats.