Abbie's Real Life Blog

This is the first time I’ve waited so long for a family Christmas celebration, and I have to say that I’m disappointed with how quickly the rest of the world dismisses the holiday.  Trees are lining the curbs and lots of people have taken down their holiday lights.  My family has always left all of it up until Epiphany, or Twelfth Night.  I’ve never quite understood the mindset of people who take it all down on the 26th, as though the entire holiday was impeding on their real life.  I really don’t understand it this year.  I’m still celebrating and they’re ready for January and what January means to them: ice, snow, and complaining about the ice and snow (because that’s what they all do).  Why not continue to celebrate?  There’s no good reason to stop.  My mother redecorates her tree in January, and changes all the red and green ornaments to blue and white and pink ornaments, and then the party continues through the beginning of February.

I’ve heard of other families that set up Christmas traditions on the day after Thanksgiving or Christmas Eve or whatever, which must not have felt right the first year they did it, and then afterwards it was tradition.  Because my brother and sister-in-law go to her parents’ house for Christmas Day now, my family has kinda been without a tradition for the past few years.  My sister is hoping that we could start a tradition of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day if this works out this year.  Maybe it would feel jollier next year.  Right now, it just feels like it’s been a month since Christmas and I didn’t even get to celebrate.

But then there’s lots of great reasons to enjoy it on New Year’s.  More time to shop, more time to enjoy the events.  It is an actual holiday, which is nice because sometimes my family picks days that aren’t actual holidays, and those of us who work regular workweeks have to take time off for the celebrations… there are a lot of good reasons.  I guess I miss the regular Christmas Day thing, but I know that I, at 31, don’t really compete with actual children ages 3 and 1 on Christmas morning.  Not that I couldn’t try!  But a 31-year-old high on sugar and adrenaline, ripping through wrapping paper at 4:00am, isn’t quite as cute as a 3-year-old and his one-year-old brother.

It was a nice Christmas Day anyway, more or less.  Tracy and I went over to my parents’ house and had dinner there on Christmas Eve with my sister and one of her out-of-town coworkers.  We chatted for awhile and left rather late.  I got it into my head to go to Midnight Mass for the first time in… a decade, maybe?  I was hoping to get to sing carols, I guess, and I decided on the campus Newman Center where they have a slightly more contemporary service and, as I figured, a smaller turnout since the students are all at home for winter break.  I ended up going by myself.  My sister and I used to have this tradition where I would promise to go with her and then I would back out at the last minute and she would be irritated with me (oh the hilarity!), but this time she didn’t fall for my “ooh, we could go to mass!!” comments.  So I went alone, which is also kind of hilarious in retrospect.  Anyway, the church was full, but not packed.  I was lured by the promise of the carols before the mass, but it turned out that it was less of a ‘let’s all sing the traditional carols together’ type thing and more of a ‘let’s have you listen to our choir and band perform obscure and new Christmas music that you have never heard before, even if you know a lot of obscure Christmas music and even if there really isn’t a point to creating new Christmas music’, which was a little disappointing.  On a couple of the songs that I did know, they changed the tune for bizarre reasons that I cannot fathom.  I mean, we all know how O Little Town of Bethlehem and Away in the Manger go, so I don’t see a good reason for changing the tune completely.  But they did allow us to sing Angels We Have Heard on High, which is one that I love because I like to really belt that Glooooo-ooooo-oooooo-ria!!! With the plus being that I was there alone, knew no one, and didn’t have to feel bad that I was singing so loud.  Anyway, it was weird to be at Mass.  I hadn’t gone in a very, very long time.

The next morning I was pretty tired, since I’d stayed up so late for Mass, but I got up early to make spinach tofu lasagna.  Tracy had to work call on Christmas Day so she didn’t even get home until about 3:00pm on Dec. 26.  Pretty shitty schedule.  I’m telling you, don’t go trying to be a doctor.  They are not kidding with that school crap.  They will try to kill you, just as you are trying to keep from killing others.  It’s a vicious circle.  Full of viciousness.

I went over to my parents’ house later in the morning and ate lunch there, and then we played a board game and chatted for awhile until I had to leave to go back home and cook more food for another family thing: soup dinner at my grandparents’ house.  I had never made soup before, but the recipe for a vegetable stew wasn’t too hard and I managed it without much trouble.  It was entirely edible.  We ate some leftover for dinner last night, and I have more for lunch today.  I might even try to make it again.  I ended up seeing a good chunk of my dad’s side of the family at my grandparents’ house, which was really nice.  That side gets together for almost every holiday (Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, Memorial Day) but very rarely at Christmas, mostly because there are just so many other in-laws to juggle at this point.  Maybe when the kids were small, but now that the grandparents are the great-grandparents, it just doesn’t happen.

Friday was back to a normal workday for me.  I probably should have taken it off and enjoyed a nice four-day weekend, but I didn’t because I usually like the quiet holiday days.  Have I mentioned that?  I’m still supposed to work this Friday, but I think I am going to try to take that one off, to make it really feel like the holidays.  Nothing like the cold shower of January 2 when everyone else is really back to work, for real for real.  I was on the fence about making yet another dish for another family party on Saturday, but ended up just taking the leftover spinach tofu lasagna.

The family party on Saturday was in Kansas City, which is about 120 miles from where we live in Columbia, Missouri.  Usually it’s not a problem, but the weather on Saturday was craziness.  It was sixty degrees when we woke up.  I went to do some errands and get a car wash.  I drove out of the car wash and into a thunderstorm (that was not occuring when I drove into the car wash, otherwise I would not have got the car wash in first place).  I ended up driving through a hailstorm.  When I got home, the weather radio was going off with not just a tornado watch but an actual tornado warning (there’s a huge difference).  There was flash flooding in swaths of the state.  We left for Kansas City anyway, since the tornado warning was past us by that time… and I watched the temperature drop thirty degrees as we drove the 120 miles.  It started snowing while we were at my grandmother’s house, and we tried to drive around the Plaza and a few of the streets between Ward Parkway and Wornall Road where they do up entire neighborhoods with lights, but my car wasn’t handling the roads very well as it was pretty slippery.  Nearly a quarter inch of snow and wet and twenty-eight degrees when we left Kansas City later that evening.  Drove home where there was no snow and no more rain, and it was about thirty-two degrees there.  My parents stayed over in KC and woke up to about an inch of snow.  We woke up to nothing in Columbia.  The bizarre part of that was that I checked the weather sites when we got home, and all of them insisted that there was no chance of snow for KC on Saturday evening and it would be clear all night.  Really weird.

We had a nice time in KC other than the strange weather conditions.  My grandmother on that side is very insistent about getting all the family together for Christmas, so we end up being a full house every time.  Sometimes my brother can’t make it, and sometimes my sister can’t make it, and sometimes Tracy has been working, but this year everyone was there except my cousin in Portland,  Oregon, who doesn’t always get back for the holidays.  Too bad for him.  As usual, my grandmother made just enough food to feed about half of the crowd that she invited.  If the rest of us didn’t bring extra dishes (which she always insists she doesn’t want us to bring, and then makes negative noises about when we do), there would not be enough food for everyone.  As it was, we left her house and went right to an Asian restaurant for dinner less than a few hours after lunch.  I mean, there were presents and chattiness in-between, but it wasn’t much of a fast.

Tracy had both weekend days off, very exciting, and she swore she wasn’t going anywhere on Sunday so we both stayed in most of the day.  I finally got around to working in the afternoon, did some laundry (my favorite!) and processed a bunch of photos for my January exhibit.  I really do intend to do new ones from California soon, but these were ones that I’d already done of California.  But they do look better than when I did them last summer.

Netflix didn’t ship anything on Friday, so I didn’t get any new Netflix to support me through the afternoon.  I only had one disc,  and it’s amazing how quickly I can run through four episodes of The X-Files.  Luckily, I had anticipated this and rented a few episodes of Carnivale.  I hadn’t seen any of it, but HBO dramas are usually pretty good, and it was between that and Rome.  Carnivale was a good complement to The X-Files, so that’s why I got it.  And then I was surprised at the whole bringing-people-to-life-at-the-expense-of-other-life conceit since that’s such a huge part of the now-cancelled Pushing Daisies.  I mean, they’re completely different shows, but still.  Anyway, I won’t get any Netflix until at least tomorrow so I will probably have to rent more Carnivale to make it through the (hopefully) four-day weekend.  I should really go ask for that day off right now.

Tonight is another family party, and the Alamo Bowl, at which MU will play.  It’s not a coincidence.  My family is full of crazy MU fans, and the party was put together just to watch the game, and oh yes also have some family time.  As there will be lots of little kids present, I should have plenty to do between taking photos and watching the game.  I think I will probably ride down with my sister, though, so I will end up leaving early.  I don’t really want to get home that late.  I don’t think any of us are expecting a great game for MU.  But maybe!

Check out my Flickr site if you want to see some of those reprocessed photos for the exhibit.  I’ll probably put something new on the photo blog when I’m done and they’re ready to be hung, but I do have some photos up at the photo blog from the December sessions.  So there is new stuff there.

I feel like this is a longer week than it is.  It isn’t.  The day after tomorrow is New Year’s Eve.  I should be back with an end-of-the-year post, a wrap-up of those resolutions I made in October, and maybe some new ones for the first quarter of 2009.  2009!!  It’s 2009!  Wow, friend.  I’ve been using it on work stuff all year because our fiscal year 2009 started in July, but it was all abstract.  I mean, now I’m using 2010 on work stuff, but that’s still very abstract.  But here it is.  2008 is almost over.  2008 will never be again.  2009 is upon us.  The end (of the year) is nigh!