Christ-más, Por Favor!

We woke up early Christmas morning and headed over to my parents' house for Christmas brunch.

Kelly, Steve, and the girls were already there; and we figured everyone else was probably just as famished and ready to tear into brunch as we wer—

Yeah, no: We're not doing brunch yet. We're going to open presents first.

—my mom

Seriously?

I had just told my starving wife and daughter an hour ago that there was absolutely, positively no need to even think about worrying what to have for breakfast at home, because we'd be chowing down the moment we got to my parents'.

And, at any rate, I wasn't ready for presents!

...I still had my wife's card to sign, gift baskets to drag out of cold storage, pranks to stage...

But apparently, the girls had been up on a three-day bender by this time or something, and they were fading fast. Starting to lose focus, even; see?

But, I went as fast as I could; and 0.006 seconds later?

<blam!>

To Riley, from Kelly and Steve's Family

I think everyone but Riley knew what she was getting: Kelly had been working on it for months and kept the rest of us apprised of her progress.

Liv delivered Part One personally...

...A recipe book filled with a bunch of recipes Kelly had laboriously copied by hand from her own collection, since Riley's been getting into baking recently :)

And then, of course, Part Two...

...A metric ton of actual baking stuff :)

To Kelly and Steve, from Us

Riley had just happened to offer us the leftovers from her Halloween candy the night before; and, when she dumped it all over the kitchen table, my brain couldn't help but to start putting together the puzzle pieces...

...A bunch of assortedly-sized candies, from bite-sized on up to king-sized...

...A four-piece set of now-mostly-empty lovely little Christmas boxes from the Christmas gift our neighbors Jeff and Lillian had given us three nights prior...

...The knowledge that Steve really likes Kit-Kats and Twizzlers, and Kelly loves Sour Patch Kids...

Thus, a prank was born!

The top box contained the smallest Kit-Kat I've ever seen: Think half of a standard Kit-Kat bar, wrapped as a singleton all by itself.

Box #2 contained, of course, a moderately larger variety of Kit-Kat—followed by Box #3 with one slightly larger still.

All of this was meant to prime Steve's subconscious mind to prepare for the king-sized Kit-Kat that would surely provide a worthwhile finale in Box #4...

But, nope: Box #4 just had a two-pack of little Twizzler stubs—two square inches in area at most.

Then it was Kelly's turn...

Box #1 had a little pack of Sour Patch Kids... so, naturally, the larger Box #2 would have a big pack of—

—No, wait... it was actually just a Three Musketeers bar the size of a mothball instead.

To Us from Kelly and Steve

Kelly and Steve got us back though: It turned out they hadn't gotten us anything at all... They just put their young daughters to work in the sweatshop of the arts and crafts room, and made them make our presents from scratch!

To Kelly and Steve, from Us (for Real This Time)

Next, we gave Kelly and Steve their real gift, which we'd also had a lot of fun creating—albeit not quite from scratch. (Like, we hadn't woven the basket together by hand or anything...)

A hot sauce variety sampler? Mikey liked it!

We also threw in some candy, some beef jerky, and some popcorn and cookies. And we included a toddler-friendly family game called Monkey Around to bring Olivia and Hannah into the fold as well :)

But, it seemed... that things were not quite what they seemed.

And, sure enough, Kelly found a mysterious envelope buried toward the bottom of the basket...

I hadn't put it there.

Athennia hadn't put it there.

But, when she saw the name on the card, Kelly immediately knew whom it was from...

Koley Are Been HAKED!

The Russian had struck again—hacking family Christmas like it was nothing!

What'd he have to say this time?

To her credit, Koley somehow managed to read the entire card out loud—though not without breaking quite a few times!

To Olivia, from... Wiley

Next up, Liv opened a couple presents from my parents...

And then I pulled her aside to ask an important question...

To Ron, from Us

Next up was my dad, and we'd had a lot of fun building his basket too...

A healthy amount of biscotti and stroopwafel—though I see now that I somehow failed to photograph the... even healther amount of K-cups we got him for his Keurig.

...And, who doesn't love a good book?

A little sci-fi to expand the mind while you're interplanetary from drinking all that Irish Cream.

You can never go wrong with Richard K. Morgan :)

To Catherine, from Us

Then it was my mom's turn...

We ran with a "cozy" concept for her...

Entenmann's crumb doughnuts like my grandma always used to have at her house—and some hot cholate K-cups to match...

A snowman Christmas mug—with a cardinal on it, which we always used to see at my grandma's house as well...

And, since my mom loves her Bible verses, how about this Cliff's notes abridgment of the Bible on a soft, warm blanket?

...And a book, of course!

(My mom reads about 350 books a week, so I have no idea what she has and hasn't read at this point. We decided to go with Anne Fortier's The Lost Sisterhood, which I felt was probably far enough outside my mom's wheelhouse to have made it onto her radar, while still being close enough for her to hopefully enjoy it.)

To Riley, from Us

Riley had opened the bulk of her presents two nights earlier on Christmas Eve Eve.

But it was at Christmas brunch last year that we surprised her with her electric guitar; and so we'd saved a few surprises for her this year as well.

First, I gave her a new multi-effects pedal for her guitar—and this is apparently the best shot I got of that...

Then Athennia told her about the catalog of guitar lessons we'd snagged way back in July or August (in whatever moment I had first stumbled on them)—which will provide her with lifetime access to lessons on just about any playing style or musical genre she might want to learn.

And then Athennia gave her a cat's-paw-shaped cushion for her desk chair...

The cushion came in Small, Medium, Large, and Kardashian.

...And, I see Athennia decided to custom-order an XK.

To Hannah and Liv, from Us

Hannah hadn't received a single gift from us yet at that point; so it was definitely time to change that!

Athennia and I had found a toy that Kelly and I used to love playing with at our grandma's house...

Lincoln Logs?! Yes, please!

To Athennia, from Me

Having given her a custom-made hand-painted lilac vase the other night, I was hoping that the last thing Athennia was expecting would be another one :)

She mined quite a bit!

Some lilac soaps and shower gel, a couple Yankee candles, a decent supply of Andes mints... and some faux-amethyst crystals I'm sure she'll have no problem repurposing into a piece of decor around the house.

To Me, from Athennia

I already knew the last things I was getting from Athennia—because we were together when we discovered them at Ross and I raved about how I had to have them...

It turned out that, while I thought I also knew what I wasn't getting... I was wrong.

We had been in Barnes and Noble way back before Thanksgiving and came across a thermos that looked like an original Nintendo Entertainment System controller...

But, a few days ago when I commented on that being one of my guesses for what she'd got me, Athennia insisted that she had forgotten all about that.

So, imagine my surprise when I opened it and she confessed that she had purchased it that same night while I was distracted for two seconds...

To Us, from Catherine and Ron

Aaaaaand, despite all the fun we had making everyone gift baskets filled with heartfelt gifts we thought they would like, we robbed my parents of that same joy and just asked them for cash.

So, apologies to them for being boring like that; but also thanks for their accommodation of our impersonal request :)

We appreciate it!

Brinner

Finally, it was time to get the food ready and eat.

At this hour, "brunch" had turned into something more like "brinner"—and most of us were getting good and hangry by then.

The smart ones among us held back to see who'd be the suckers that got stuck doing the cooking...

...It's hard to enlist someone's help when they have a little kid in their hands—although, in hindsight, they totally could've put Riley to work on one of the griddles.

In all seriousness, thanks to my dad and Kelly for doing the bulk of the meal-prep—and to Kitten for making the cinnamon rolls :)

We certainly had a very healthy amount of very unhealthy food to choose from!

After we ate, a squirrel showed up to wish us a merry Christmas...

...then Liv ran over to reciprocate, and he bolted, and she was sad...

I decided to go outside and get some air.

I checked on the garlic (and the volunteer mustard greens that think they have a chance at surviving the winter as well)...

Then I decided to spend half an hour ripping out all the dead gladiolus leaves from my mom's flower garden: By this point, they're soft and weak enough that they just tear away from the bulbs (or, the corms) when you tug on them.

Plus, it was Christmas—and I had to imagine that the compost pile was hungry for brinner and gifts just like the rest of us ;)

The girls kept coming to the door to see just what the heck I was doing out there...

But they were long overdue for their naps by then; so Kelly and Steve got their stuff together and headed out soon thereafter. And when I got back inside, I found Kitten and the Molerat visiting with my parents...

To Lou, from Athennia

We headed home soon after that as well: In addition to my family's traditional Christmas brunch, Kitten wants to maintain her tradition of preparing a home-cooked Christmas dinner as well.

But first, she headed over to her mom's to wish her a merry Christmas as well—especially with Lou being home all alone (with Taylor being up in Connecticut with Ahlina for a week or two over Christmas break from school).

Lest you thought this could just be a clean and wholesome post about love and togetherness for Christmas though, we were back in the ghetto of Morrisville now...

And so, while Kitten was gone, I had a small run-in with a few of our lovely neighbors...

Having heard decidedly-mischievous voices outside our bedroom window, I was already watching (with phone in hand) when a group of four little twats on the younger side of the teenagehood spectrum decided to start smashing empty beer bottles in the street just past the guardrail.

But before I could yell at them, one of them actually spotted me first!

At this point, three of them had the sense to bolt... But, of course one had to stay behind to protest,

I guess he was content with that answer, because then he turned and high-tailed it out of there as well...

But with that, the kid in front of him—ever tough, while running away with a stream of urine leaking out of his pant-leg—decided he just had to get in the last word. And so, still running full speed ahead, he shouted back at me...

Whew.

Kitten returned a bit later and got in the kitchen to prepare dinner...

All in all, it was a wonderful day spent in the company of the people closest to us (even if it was over too quickly, as always).

Merry Christmas, everyone!