Holiday Festivities

This year we had many great adventures during the holidays.  We flew out to California for Christmas with Robyn's family and then returned home to celebrate New Years here.  It was fun to get to know them all better, to play together, to eat together and just enjoy each others company.  Robyn has written about the trip already, but I thought I'd include a few small anecdotes from my perspective.

The Amazing Food
The best thing about Robyn's family is that all family traditions are centered around food.  From the crepes Christmas Eve morning to the massive dinner on Christmas day, it was all delicious.


The Nativity and After Affects
As is tradition, we acted out the nativity story the night of Christmas Eve.  We put on our costumes and played our parts.  Here are Robyn and I as shepherds.  (I bet you didn't know that Mr. Clean was a shepherd.)

Afterward, most of the family went into the other room and sang Christmas songs.  I stayed and played with my niece Addie.  She really wanted to play dress up in the various costume fragments.  She had me kneel on the floor so that she could reach my head and then she dressed me up in various costumes.  I think her favorite was when she dressed me as Mary.

The Picture Permutations
The day after Christmas we celebrated Robyn's Oma's (German Grandmother) birthday.  It was really neat because they were able to bring together all of her living descendants.  Of course, as part of the celebration we took many many pictures.  I appreciate pictures after the fact, but I'm never one to enjoy being in them.  My brother-in-law Kevin feels the same way.  After taking a number of pictures with different combinations of who was in them, he expressed in frustration: "We don't have to take every possible permutation."  I appreciated the mathematical approach to the situation.  After a few calculations I figured out that we could have taken 32,768 unique pictures with the 15 people that were there.  If we took a picture every 10 seconds and didn't stop to sleep or eat it would still take us nearly 4 days to get all the pictures, so  I guess the 45 minutes we took wasn't too bad.

The Gingerbread Creations
Robyn already wrote about the Gingerbread igloo.  I just wanted to share the part that I made.  They had been working on the whole scene for several days.  Robyn's mom said that I should make a dog sled.  I was afraid due to my lack of any artistic ability.  She assured me that no one gets fired, so I agreed to proceed.  This was the result:  (I know it's not that great, but be proud of me anyway)

The Informative Young Child
When we flew home, our plane landed in Salt Lake and everyone was standing up getting ready to get off the plane.  Suddenly, I heard a scream about 3 rows ahead of me.  It wasn't the bloodcurdling sort that means "I'm being murdered."  It was more of the "I'm receiving a surprise that is not pleasant right now" sort of scream.  I then heard a little boy, about age 3 saying "What's wrong mommy?"  When he got his answer he stood up on his chair facing backwards so he could let us all know what happened.  "She frowed up....all over mommy."  Then as a follow-up he said: "She's sick" at which his sister yelled, "I'm not sick!"

All in all, it was an excellent trip and we've enjoyed our time back at home relaxing as well.