Happy Boxing Day

I hope everyone had a good weekend. I've been at my brother's house for the last couple of days and just got home today. It was a great weekend. On Friday, my work has a family Christmas party, so I invited my family. Eleven people ended up coming: my parents, my aunt & uncle, my brother and his wife and kids, my SiL's sister, and my SiL's parents. It was actually pretty awesome. The kids got their faces painted and saw Santa. I gave everyone a little tour of the building and showed them the fish and lobsters in the lab tanks. After that it was over to my SiL's house for their family's traditional Polish Christmas Eve dinner.

I couldn't eat most of the traditional foods (shish kabob, cabbage rolls, dumplings), but I could still eat the borscht and perogies. And the dessert, which is important. And the candy cane martinis, which was even more important.

That was a hectic dinner, there were twelve adults and two kids. My aunt brought her guitar and we sang carols.

  At some point, my niece charmed me into letting her use my camera and she took some decent pictures.

 

 

 After the kids went to bed on Christmas Eve, we ate the Santa cookies and gnawed on the carrots to create reindeer marks.

Then we played a really awful Trivial Pursuit-style Christmas trivia game. It was clear that they needed a certain number of questions to make the game, but really only had enough material for a far fewer number of questions, because many questions were recycled. A good third of the questions could be answered with Elves, Santa Claus, or Merry Christmas. Some of the questions were hilariously easy, such as:

Q: In what country do Parisians eat Chocolate logs on Christmas day?
Q: In what country do kids in Oslo go trick-or-treating on the day after Christmas?

Playing with my mom is awesome, because she rarely needs to hear the entire question and she'll yell out an answer. At one point my brother predicted that mom would hear "Who..." as the start to a question and yell out "Ronald Regan" and be right. Then, about an hour later, it happened.

Q: Who was president for Christmas 1982?
A: Ronald Regan

My brother then predicted that mom would hear "What..." and answer "Ice crusher" and be correct. That question never did materialize.

We went to bed around 12:30 and my niece and nephew woke up the house 5.5 hours later insisting that it was light out. It so was not. My nephew said that it was light outside his window, and apparently that's all that matters, even though the sun wouldn't rise for almost 2 more hours.

Onto the presents! We don't really exchange presents in my family anymore. We buy stuff for the kids (or make donations in their name, if we're not supporting the Shopocalypse) and the adults get stocking stuffers for each other. Even though I only got stocking stuffers, I still got two presents that surprised the Hell out of me. I was so surprised that I almost swore in front of the kids. This is what I got:

My oldest brother was a U2 fan way before me, and when he was in high school he had these flags. Years ago I asked him if he still had them, and he said that he thought he did but didn't know where they were. Over the years I would occasionally ask him if he'd found them, but at some point I just gave up hope. This summer he found them in boxes he hadn't looked in since going away to college. I'm still excited over this. This flag has a copyright from 1984 on it. I had forgotten he had more than one, so when I opened this one, it was surprised all over again.

I have no idea what I'm going to do with them, but they're mine!

Christmas dinner was at my Aunt's house and was a quiet affair compared to Christmas Eve. Today was Boxing Day and my mom came over for a Schlock-a-thon, which I will write about later. Tomorrow is shopping!