We Wish You a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

I suppose it's about time that I post a report about the holidays.  It was a nice week to spend with my family, and we got to do some interesting things over the course of it.  Unfortunately, there was also a decent amount of sickness going around that also put a bit of a damper on things.  Overall, though, I throughly enjoyed the holiday season.

On Christmas Eve, I picked my parents up from the airport.  Because Marinda could apparently only talk to us at 5 AM that morning, I stayed at Gerrit and Elisabeth's too.  After a few hours of sleep, we all stumbled out bed to assemble around the computer.  Marinda Google Talked to us from her branch president's home.  It was nice to get to see and hear from her in real-time.  I can't really remember anything she talked about, but we did get to say hello to her comp and the branch pres as well as the ward mission leader, I believe.  She and her comp sang a hymn in Tagalog in the end and then we all tumbled back into bed for a few more hours.

In the second phase of Christmas morning, we got to see the kids come down and be excited about Santa coming.  Then we all opened presents together for an hour or so.  I'd forgotten how Christmas is WAY more exciting with kids around.  The last time I was around kids at Christmas would have to be when Marinda was a kid and I was more or less just a teenager.  That's been quite awhile now with nothing but grown-ups for Christmas, and it's really not the same.  Adults can pretty much just get whatever they want whenever they want it, while kids basically have to save up everything they want for their birthday and Christmas.  This basic fact of life creates a pretty distinct negative correlation between holiday excitement and age.  I still like giving and getting presents at Christmas, but I'm probably more excited about it than everyone else in the family, so it was nice to have the kids to share in the enthusiasm!

The rest of the day was mostly just lounging around.  We had breakfast and dinner, talked to Grandma, and played with the kids and their new toys.  For me, this mostly entailed setting up obstacle courses for Miles with the cones I got him and trying to prevent Molly from moving them, as she was pretty enamored of these new thingamajigs as well.  I also played Chutes and Ladders and Candyland with Miles a few times.  Obstacle courses and board games are about all that Miles wants from me.  Kids have pretty simple, albeit often often very single-minded needs.  After 6 or 7 rounds of a children's board game, I'm pretty beat, but he's always still going strong!

In the evening, after the kids when to bed, we played a new game Gerrit had gotten called Forbidden Island, which is pretty similar to Pandemic.  It's a cooperative game, and I liked it quite well as far as board games go.  We played both games as well as Boggle, Guestimations, and various card games over the week.  I'm pretty fond of playing fun games with friends and family, so this suited me quite well.  It turns out that Elisabeth is freakishly excellent at Boggle, I'm better at estimating than I thought, and it's a lot easier to wipe the whole world out with diseases than it is to wipe them out!

The rest of the week was largely the same.  After work, I'd go to Gerrit and Elisabeth's and we'd eat, play with the kids, and play games.  Elisabeth and the kids got the stomach flu at various times, so that did throw a damper on things a bit, but fortunately they weren't down and out for very long.  It did, unfortunately, prevent them from coming with us to SLC on New Year's Eve though, which was probably the most eventful day.  I worked a half day while Mom and Dad drove the Goldfish down to Provo to see the sacred arts display at BYU, then they picked me up and we went to the Church History Museum.

There, I'd arranged for us to see the summer coat that Francis Boggs, one of my ancestors, wore.  He was in the first company that arrived in Salt Lake and his oxen were reportedly the ones used to plow the first ground in the valley.  We were told that he wore the coat at a number of Pioneer Day celebrations after settling in the valley, and that was why they have kept it after it was donated by a family member somewhere down the line.  We also saw the gun John Solomon Fullmer gave to Joseph Smith in Carthage, but that gun is on permanent display in the museum.  They didn't have any record of John Solomon's connection to it, but that is what the family history relates.

After we looked through the rest of the museum, we went to visit Grandma's cousin, Alice Cowan, to see the pig.  Esther Susan Milo brought two pigs back from her mission to England to give to her daughters, Venice and Ruby.  Grandma inherited Venice's pig, but when they moved to IF from Moreland, it broke and was lost.  Alice inherited Ruby's pig, and she and Grandma were very close as the only girls in their families, so Grandma has pictures of herself with the pig from occasions when she visited.  I've wanted to see the pig for a long time for myself, and having almost all the family here seemed like a good occasion.

Dad can remember visiting Alice and her family as a kid, but he hadn't been there since he was a teen.  This meant that we did get a little lost on the way, though not too badly.  The Cowans' were a very nice family.  Alice and her husband were there along with one of their daughters.  We enjoyed visiting with them as well as checking out the pig for about an hour.  Gerrit had mentioned that with a video of each angle of the pig, we might be able, someday, to print a 3D version of it for ourselves.  So I got the video, and I hope that someday I might have at least a replica of the pig for myself because I really like it.

After our visit, we went back downtown to enjoy a few of the New Year's Eve festivities.  There was an Irish step dance group that I had been interested in seeing, so we went to the Tabernacle to watch.  Before they performed, we caught a few pieces being played by an organist.  It's been a long time since I've heard the Tabernacle organ played in person, and I'd forgotten just how inspiring it is.  The sound of it is so rich and immense, it made me feel glad to be alive and able to appreciate it.  The Irish group was decent, but not spectacular, unsurprisingly.  It was still fun to watch for a bit.  Next was a Babershop group, and after we listened to a song or two, Mom wanted to go see the lights more on the square.  Dad didn't want to go, so he stayed in the Tabernacle and I went with Mom.

Even on the mission, I never really got to see the lights because I was in Magna, and even when we attended Christmas Devo with a recent convert family, they had to get back to their baby quickly so we didn't get to see the lights much except what was visible as we made a beeline to and from the Conference Center.  It was nice to get to see everything in it's full glory.  They do a good job of pretty fully outlining the trees and there's also several nice nativities.  It was fun to see it all and be with Mom.

We picked up Dad and had dinner at the Blue Lemon before going back to Gerrit and Elisabeth's house so they could say goodbye.  I dropped Mom and Dad off at their hotel, then came home to get a bit of sleep before I had to take Mom and Dad to the airport at 6 AM, basically proving that my whole family has some inexplicable desire to make me wake up repeatedly at indecent hours!  I took Mom and Dad to the airport, then came home and tried to catch up on all the mundane stuff I'd neglected to do for the past week for the rest of the day, mixing a small nap in halfway through the day.

And that was about the extent of the holidays.  Though it doesn't sound especially exciting or memorable, I enjoyed getting to spend much more time than usual now with all my family, as that is the most important thing to me, and I don't get much opportunity for it now.  I wish Mom and Dad could have stayed longer, but I'm glad they were here for awhile at least.  Overall, it was an enjoyable week for me.