2 posts tagged “christmas eve”
Yesterday was the majority of the planned Christmas celebrations for my family with our gift exchange happening in the afternoon and then going over to my grandparents (mothers side) in the evening.
I got to my parents house around 11 because I had to shred some stuff and I'm too cheap to buy a shredder myself. I had cleaned my bedroom out the previous days and I had a stack of old pay stubs and stuff that I had to dispose of. That took an awful long time to shred. After that I hung out and watched the ER Christmas episode marathon on TNT until my sister and her husband arrived shortly before 1am at which time we commenced with the gift opening.
Probably the best part of the whole thing was two presents my mom gave to my dad and my sister. My sister has a habit of, lets say..using a lot of tape when wrapping gifts. Using A LOT of tape. Usually taping up every single opening in the paper that could be used to gain a foothold for the opening. She does it to one package a year, usually to my mom. So this year, my mom got revenge. She gave both my sister and my dad (for laughing at her when she's trying to open it year after year) presents that contained boxes wrapped inside of boxes inside of boxes, all taped up, with just a little note inside (although my dad got a gift certificate to the restaurant they like to eat at in his)
It was a penguin Christmas for me. My mom made me up a really nice penguin themed shower curtain and a couple of penguin themed pillows. There was also some penguin related kitchen stuff, including a really cool set of plates with penguins ice skating and on each plate, the penguins keep falling down and off the plates. I kept thinking my friends who already thing this obsession is becoming a problem are going to think I went off the deep end.
In the non penguin department and yet still decorational department, my parents have this really cool crystal thing that rotates while shining lights up through the crystal to illuminate a 3d design inside of it that I liked when I was over there. This year they found a fish related one, which I tried to take a picture of over to the right, but it's extremely hard to do since you can't use the flash and it needs to be a little dark to get the effect.
Moving into the non decorations was a set of screwdrivers which I really needed, as well as a tool box destined to slowly empty of screwdrivers as I scatter them around my apartment never to be found again.
And then finally I got my own little in-car GPS unit because I keep borrowing my parents GPS to go places. It's a Garmin Nuvi 650 which appears to be in full working condition. I just need someplace to go with it now.
My dad got a Wii which was the result of a scheme my Mom and Myself tried to pull to keep it secret. We tried using my credit card to make the purchase, but it triggered my fraud protection after wal-mart had denied the purchase after which we used my moms credit card and it worked. Chase still called me and wanted to authorize the charges on my card though, so...it had potential to be a minor mess. It turned out all right though.
We set the Wii up and played a little bit of Wii sports before having dinner (mmm, lasagna) and heading over to my grandparents house for the traditional Christmas Eve party. As usual, the highlight for me was the traditional game of Pitch which was almost usurped by something called apples to apples, which I am assured is a fun game, but it's not Pitch. The girls team won the first two games while the boys team won the next two. After that I left the game, so I don't really know what happened in the tiebreaker match. I went back to my parents and we played a little more Wii type stuff, and then I took off to go to sleep.
Today I'm going back to my parents for some more Wii action, and the christmas cinnamon rolls of course. I should have some more pictures of the penguin stuff up later. I only took a picture of the crystal now because it was hard for me to describe properly.
Wow, yesterday was exhausting.
I got a call from my sister at 8:22am. "Santa came! Get over here so we can open presents!" The plan was for me to head over at 9, but I guess she got a little antsy. Fine by me. I head over to my parents house for the ritual cinnamon bun and Christmas gift exchange. I ended up with a bunch of penguin themed kitchen items. Woohoo! Oh, and some cleaning supplies. It's amazing how much you appreciate this kind of stuff after you move out. I also now have a LARGE stack of games that I need to play, and a pair of Sennheiser HD-595s which are AWESOME. I can't stop listening to these things.
After the gifts, we hung out at my parents for a couple hours and headed for my apartment after lunch for the Wii party.
That part went really well. First of all, I discovered that I CAN fit 5 people in my apartment without some sort of a pry bar to get them all through the door. We mostly played Wii Sports Bowling, Tennis and Powershots from the training section. I tried introducing Rayman, but I'm not sure they were quite ready for that as far as wrapping their heads around the motion control. Maybe some other time.
The best part was my sister boxing her fiance. They REALLY went at it. My sister won.
We finished up with the Wii (My sister complaining that her arm hurt. I warned her!) and went to my grandmothers to meet with the rest of the family. 5 hours of kids running wild, catching up with everybody and, of course, the traditional Christmas Eve game of Pitch. As usual, we split up into teams, girls against the guys. The guys cleaned up this year.
After all of that I fell into bed around 10:30ish and just got up a few minutes before I started writing this post. This afternoon I'm headed out to my Aunts house to take care of the family stuff for my dad's side. My parents might be coming back here for a little bit for some more Wii action as well. Not sure on that, we'll have to see when they call me.
