Friday, December 26, 2008

A Christmas Miracle Starring Me


We hosted Christmas for my family this year because we live in the direct center of our little family diaspora and we have The Party House, a sort of Suburban Sprawl in house form, built with aircraft carrier-size kitchen counter surfaces and plenty of big rooms, loosely connected by poorly designed arterials.

The dinner was scheduled for four pm, with my folks coming upriver from Longview and my sister's family driving down from the Greater Seattle area.  That's ten people for dinner.  No sweat.  A good ham and some roasted yams, some fresh-baked rolls and some green stuff to make it all slide through.  We had agreed that none of us needed to gorge ourselves Thanksgiving-style.  January and its requisite resolutions are right around the corner.  No need to slip on a bigger coat of fat just to try to sweat it off in a couple of weeks.

After dinner we expected another five more to come up from Corvallis for dessert after stopping in Salem for Christmas dinner.  We were hoping to see them by seven.

We saw them at four.  Their Salem dinner had been canceled due to the weather (we're knee deep in the stuff), so they just came up here.  

No matter.  The ham was ample. The yams were cut in half.  The kids don't like salad. There was just enough veggies and dip.  And we had overbought soft drinks because the more you buy, the cheaper they get. And Mom had spent the last month baking approximately thirty dozen cookies (not an exaggeration).  So everyone ate, everyone was full, the name-drawing, gift-exchanging process went smoothly, all the hipster kids had fun playing board games, and the older generation had fun talking about how getting old sucks.

Loaves and fishes time, bitches.  Loaves and freaking fishes.

I'm hoping for the water-to-wine thing next year.

1 comment:

Andrew A said...
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