Christmas 2009, part 1:
Christmas Eve is usually the day we spend with Susan’s aunt and mom at Susan’s aunt’s house in the northwestern suburbs of Chicago; dinner is followed by passing out the presents (a small child is usually too excited to sit through dinner in any sort of relaxed fashion, and is the elf who supervises the distribution and opening of the presents). This is the first year that we pretty much dispensed with Santa as a gift giver, and so there were only a couple of presents to distribute under the tree at home the next morning…
Usually, Connie (my MIL) would stay overnight at her sister’s house and leave there in the morning to go see Susan’s brother Doug and his family over the Christmas-New Year’s period, but there’s a terrible blizzard in South Dakota this year - high winds and over two feet of snow - so she’s staying here until the weather clears up, probably till Monday.
The big presents had already been handed out for the household earlier in the month; the house got a new HD TV setup in the living room. Susan had needed a new pair of boots early, so the Ugg boots I bought for her went out a few days earlier - it was a necessity, but I didn’t like passing out presents early. (She also got a very nice pair of lambskin mittens, via her mom, and a couple of other things from me.)
My personal presents were probably the smallest; I got a pair of VERY nice gloves from my MIL, and a set of four skeins of yarn from Susan - she’s knitting me a new (badly needed) winter hat. (My old ones went over to her, as my MIL had essentially felted the things by running them through the washer and dryer without thinking hard as to how to do it without the things shrinking.)
Susan’s aunt Marlyce and her longtime pal and roomie Carol were VERY generous this year; they gave Mere a middling sized HDTV, and gave Susan and I a set of Japanese-inspired dishes - a nice blue and beige eight-place-setting set. Both of those are still at Marlyce’s house, because the SUV was overloaded with Stuff Connie Is Taking Back To South Dakota, and there was no room to put all that in there.
Mere also got a sheepskin cover for her seatbelt shoulder strap; actually, everyone but me got one of those. There’s a really nice store called The Complete Sheep Shoppe outside of DeKalb, Illinois, and it has a ton of really nice sheepskin and fleece stuff, and that’s where Susan and Connie did a lot of shopping.
The standout stuff went to Mere, as usual. She cleaned up, as usual, and got things like an O Henry collection for kids (Kurt and John), a knotwork thing that is hard to describe (Sissy and company) and two DVD sets - a Walking With Dinosaurs collection and the first season of the Canadian girl’s series EMILY OF NEW MOON - which she said was an interesting display of the different sides of her personality.
She got the TV, as mentioned earlier, and she was sent on a mystery-clue mission throughout the house with various cryptic cards scattered up and downstairs that she had to then reassemble and use the first words of each to get the final clue as to where the present actually was.
Carol and Marlyce are becoming big fans of recorded books and MP3 music, and bought themselves twin iTouch PDA/MP3 players and the stuff that goes with (chargers, speaker stations, etc.) and ran across an unheard of deal for an 8 Gig iTouch - $50. Meredith had been taking it upon herself to figure out the iTouches and show the aunties how they worked (the aunties are VERY untechnical) and in the process was lusting deep and strong for the things. Oh, how she tried to figure out a way to get us to get her one. Oh, how she steamed at the bit to go up to the aunties’ place and putz around with the iTouches.
And of course, she had no idea that we had already bought the cheap iTouch for her (her MP3 player had died last summer in Alabama due to being accidentally dunked with soda) and realized quite to her speechless astonishment that the thing at the end of the series of clues was HER iTouch (Susan had put up a graphic that said ‘yes, it’s yours’ when the iTouch came on - nice touch.)
Quite speechless, which is a feat for Miss Endlessly Gabby. She got the thing set up to work with the wireless at the aunties’ house and at our house, and has had her head stuck in that a good deal since.
The second big standout for her (one of the under the tree presents) was a 1966 era Smith Corona Galazie portable mechanical typewriter; she’s had a jones to be Girl Reporter like Kit Kittredge, and once she got the thing on Christmas Morning, she plunged into that bit of retro-tech and spent a lot of the day with it.
There was a problem with it, though. More on that and Christmas dinner in the next post.