This holiday break was pretty good, in fact, I dare say, it was very good. The biggest thing we did was travel out to Virginia for Christmas. Now some of you may be saying, “but didn’t you go to Viriginia last year and you’re supposed to alternate Christmases?” You are correct in your thinking, but this was my dad’s 60th birthday (on Christmas day) so we made a special exception to go visit my parents two years in a row. We packed up the dogs and gifts and headed out on the 22nd. We stopped in Nashville on the way out for the night breaking the trip into a 10+ hour drive and a 9- hour drive. The trip wasn’t too bad, the weather was nice the whole way, just slightly overcast so you don’t have to squint while driving. We got there around 2 or 3, my dad wasn’t home so we got to sit down and relax a bit. When dad finally got home from work, my mother shuffled us into the dining room and told him our gifts finally arrived and “it’s wierd, there’s a big one and a small one.” He came in and saw us sitting there and realized we were the gifts. By the time he’d gone upstairs and came back down, he realized we were there because he’d turned 60. He muttered something and wandered off. Two days later, on Christmas eve, we were watching TV and dad was mostly asleep when my brother and his wife also showed up. I ran to the door to hush them and bring them into the den. They sat down on the floor as if they’d been there the whole time. We all stayed really quiet for a while, but then we realized dad wasn’t waking up, so we just started chatting. Eventually, he opened his eyes enough to see them and in a half sleep said, “hey, what are you two doing here.” Being that he was half asleep, he didn’t seem quite as surprised as we’d expected, especially since there was a huge snowstorm between Indiana and Virginia. We promised him there would be no more surprises. 😉
Christmas went well, we had breakfast, opened presents, emptied stockings, etc. We strayed from standard tradition this year. Usually, someone sits under the tree and hands out one gift to each person and we all unwrap them before another round starts. Well, Jeremy and Christy are still kind of getting back on their feet, so the ran out pretty quickly and dad was the one giving out gifts, so with all his muttering and the awkwardness of not being able to give Jeremy and Christy any more gifts, we just put everyone’s gifts at their feet and we started opening at our own pace. I got some things I totally didn’t expect from some people I never would have expected to get them from. Heather gave me 30 Years of Adventure, a relatively expensive coffee-table book on the history of D&D. Her mother, of all people, got me a wireless controller for my Xbox and my own mother got me the Halo Soundtrack. I got Heather (or us, rather) the photo printer we’d been looking at while my dad got mom her own photo printer, so we spent a lot of Christmas Day printing photos and comparing quality. Fortunately mom thought hers looked best and heather thought her own print looked best. Dad also got a DVD player for the house and a subscription to Blockbuster Online. While we were configuring the DVD player and making sure everything was working up to snuff, mom had snuck out with Christy to go get dad’s brother and his wife who had flown in from GA that afternoon.
He was rumaging around the den looking for the remote to the DVD player when they all came back. His brother, Chris, asked what he was looking for, and without thinking anything was out of the ordinary muttered that he was looking for the remote. Chris told him it was behind me on the couch and it was about then that dad realized he’d been talking to his brother. He griped about mom doing all this to him and getting her back in 3 years when she turns 60.
I hardly ever get to see my uncle Chris and his wife, so it was really nice to have them there, even if for just a couple days. Each day after that, someone would leave until we were the last ones to leave on the 28th. As we were getting close to Nashville where we intended to stop for the night, we realized it would only be 3:00 when we stopped and decided, almost on a whim, to just cancel our reservations and go all the way through 19 hours. At about 2:30 in the morning wiht lots of rauccus singing and laughing to keep ourselves awake, we pulled into the driveway and collapsed in bed.
I’ll continue with New Years and the first week of work in another entry, don’t want to scare you away with too big of an entry.
