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On the Road again....
Dec. 26th, 2009 08:08 amQueue the Willy Nelson, ne?
The family is off to the supposedly warmer climes of South Carolina, and that means I am up and ready bright and early to get my little buns out the door.
I'm actually kind of pleased that our original plans to fly on Christmas got stymied- the tradition of my family is to unwrap and enjoy presents at a leisurely pace, and having to curtail that and get ready to fly out fast seemed like it would really have ruined the mood.
We got my father an iPod Touch under the impression that, since he is a bit of a hacker, he would be able to make the necessary machinations with his Linux box to get iTunes up and running, but after several hours yesterday that seems to have been put aside. I feel bad about that: I thought it would just be a matter of installing something extra to get iTunes to run on Ubuntu, but it seems that we may have gotten my father a particularly nice and shiny rock for Christmas.
On Christmas traditions:
Christmas Eve: Lasagna. It must be Lasagna. This is because my father was almost half Italian. And I do not mean that he's 7/8's Italian- I mean he's totally Irish and it was a very near miss on being Italian.
After the feast, one present- not one of the big/good ones, but a small one. (Brother boy usually handles the doling out of presents around the circle, and his anxiety about making sure that we like out gifts usually means that he hands out his presents first. We try to limit that a little- what's the fun if he doesn't have to squirm like the rest of us?)
Christmas morn- The kids are usually too lazy to move in the morning for presents or not, but since we were once small and spritely, the rule was long ago established that you can unload your stocking before the others get up, but you can't open any presents. This worked pretty well if you discount the year that I got my stocking at 4 am, demolished it, and then moved on to my sister's.
Brother acts as the gift-monkey and hands presents out to everyone in a round, and then one person opens them at a time while the others coo. There is very little open animosity- if you don't like a present, you generally approach the person later and get a receipt to exchange it. For the most part in these later years, people have gotten pretty good at figuring out what other people want in terms of presents, so there are very few moments of real unhappiness anymore.
And I could probably go on, but I have no yet gotten any coffee in my belly.
The family is off to the supposedly warmer climes of South Carolina, and that means I am up and ready bright and early to get my little buns out the door.
I'm actually kind of pleased that our original plans to fly on Christmas got stymied- the tradition of my family is to unwrap and enjoy presents at a leisurely pace, and having to curtail that and get ready to fly out fast seemed like it would really have ruined the mood.
We got my father an iPod Touch under the impression that, since he is a bit of a hacker, he would be able to make the necessary machinations with his Linux box to get iTunes up and running, but after several hours yesterday that seems to have been put aside. I feel bad about that: I thought it would just be a matter of installing something extra to get iTunes to run on Ubuntu, but it seems that we may have gotten my father a particularly nice and shiny rock for Christmas.
On Christmas traditions:
Christmas Eve: Lasagna. It must be Lasagna. This is because my father was almost half Italian. And I do not mean that he's 7/8's Italian- I mean he's totally Irish and it was a very near miss on being Italian.
After the feast, one present- not one of the big/good ones, but a small one. (Brother boy usually handles the doling out of presents around the circle, and his anxiety about making sure that we like out gifts usually means that he hands out his presents first. We try to limit that a little- what's the fun if he doesn't have to squirm like the rest of us?)
Christmas morn- The kids are usually too lazy to move in the morning for presents or not, but since we were once small and spritely, the rule was long ago established that you can unload your stocking before the others get up, but you can't open any presents. This worked pretty well if you discount the year that I got my stocking at 4 am, demolished it, and then moved on to my sister's.
Brother acts as the gift-monkey and hands presents out to everyone in a round, and then one person opens them at a time while the others coo. There is very little open animosity- if you don't like a present, you generally approach the person later and get a receipt to exchange it. For the most part in these later years, people have gotten pretty good at figuring out what other people want in terms of presents, so there are very few moments of real unhappiness anymore.
And I could probably go on, but I have no yet gotten any coffee in my belly.
