Christmas day was really pretty laid back. We got up around 9, wrapped presents, ate orange rolls for breakfast–
–ok, see, my family has Traditions. These Traditions are set by us doing something once and then saying the next year, “We ALWAYS do X!” After a while, it becomes true. One of these Traditions is having pizza on Christmas Eve, which we started doing when I was about 14, I think, although possibly it was many years before that. This year we did not have pizza on Christmas Eve, although Mom said she thought about it *several* times. However, since she had no idea when anybody was coming back from shopping/collecting Grandma/etc, she thought she’d just make dinner. And potato soup is very fine, so I have no objections to breaking Tradition for once.
So Christmas morning we had orange rolls, and I had to ask, because while I *suspected* it was a Tradition, I couldn’t actually remember for sure. So I said, “Do we always have orange rolls for Christmas breakfast?” And Mom stared at me in horror and said, “We ALWAYS have orange rolls! It’s *Tradition*!” Well, I thought it was, but it’s hard to be sure. :)
So after our Traditional Orange Rolls, we sat around reading or something and waiting for Deirdre and Gavin to get back from southern Washington where they’d spent Christmas morning with Gavin’s family. We didn’t get around to opening Christmas presents until about one, in other words, making it the most relaxed Christmas in the history of our family. And despite the fact that we’d had to bring gifts or buy them there, there was quite a lot of loot. Among the highlights were a HUGE book on mammals that Gavin received (apparently Ted and I had missed an extended conversation about marsupials, before we arrived, and the book was to help Gavin learn all about marsupials so next time he saw the family he could explain them in detail. Instead we all sat around and pored over the book and learned about marsupials and many other very strange and interesting animals.) and Deirdre’s red hat, which was a duplicate of one she lost a few months ago and was very very sad about losing. There were books of poetry and calendars and oh, crap, I still haven’t balanced the checkbook. More later.
