Yay Christmas!

So here I am back home, after four days of staying with my parents. Kate and Ellen came down too for a few days! Here they are opening their stockings.

.....and here's Mum looking on...

....Dad looking thrilled...

....and me in a bunch of poinsettias.


We had such a great time. My family is nuts. We did nothing but eat and tell stupid stories the entire time. My aunt gave my Dad this very tasteful gift of a chihuahua-like stuffed animal dog thing that you strap to your leg and it humps you, energetically and relentlessly. It was beyond fabulous. It's just one of those presents that you cannot believe any sane person would ever wrap up and give away. No one in my family is sane, so we try to one-up each other every Christmas. Ellen gave me a phallic glittery lamp thing which my Mum was entirely too OCD about ("it glows red 21 times before it shuts off!"). Another aunt gave us each one of those fake water scene picture things you sometimes see hanging in cheap bars, where you plug it in and the water appears to move. Lovely. I shall always treasure it (no I won't). And my other aunt seems to labor under the delusion that I am exceedingly religious, so she gave me a scripture-of-the-day desk calendar (which I will thank her profusely for, just to be polite, but I will never ever even open the thing, much less actually use it). I used to have this great-aunt named Olga who would give us the most extraordinarily useless presents (always clothes, always tacky-- shimmery sweaters, often gold or beaded or rhinestoned, often all three, and either size XS or XXXXXL) but she died so we have to look to other relatives to fill that role. Thankfully there is no shortage of candidates!

But it's getting late-- more stories later-- and more pictures, because I have a camera! Yippee!!!!!