Christmas is now over and in its aftermath the kids are going through the living room looking for the stuff they had time to play with yesterday and discovering all over again the stuff that they didn't even get around to opening yesterday. Justin is old enough now that a lot of his toys are ones I want to play with.



For Christmas eve dinner, since I had a couple of days off and hadn't been inspired to do anything for Thanksgiving, I took it upon myself to whip up a Christmas dinner with a rib roast and some carrots and potatoes and red onions and lobster corn chowder and a peanut butter cheesecake. The kids of course ate almost nothing of it, but there was plenty for Beth and myself, and her brother came over and joined in too since he was otherwise unattached on Christmas eve. There was enough left over to do it again tonight, since the kids won't eat it, not that I particularly expected them to. Chloe at least will try different things now, she ate some of the chowder, but the meat was "chewy" (because it wasn't hamburger, I guess). This made two holiday meals in a row that Beth's mother wasn't in attendance, so it was truly a magical Christmas.



Last night for Christmas dinner we all assembled at Chef Orient in Framingham for teppanyaki, something we started doing last Christmas and it seemed to go even better this year, maybe because we weren't worried about impending snow this time. Sue was there for this one, recently out of the hospital with a mild case of pneumonia and now in the rehabilitative wing of the local nursing home since she's not sick enough for the hospital but not well enough to live on her own. Beth spent most of the last week getting all that going, so that cut way into her Christmas preparation time, but she still managed to get everything done, although it required one near all-nighter to get the kids presents sorted out and ready.



The kids made a good haul from Santa, Chloe got her third American Girl doll along with a bunch of outfits for it, Justin got some new Dino Thunder Power Rangers and some giant Go-Bot thing he was all excited about. Beth's big present from me was a new tv for the "desk room", although I have no idea where we'll put it. She got me some Dover editions of piano music of Grieg, Satie and Beethoven, plus an SD card for my PDA and the DVD's of Life of Brian and Life of Python. Mom got me a new portable CD player that also will play MP3's. Jill got me and the kids some new NU gear.



Today was both trash day and recycling day, so a lot of empty boxes and a lot of garbage bags went out on the curb this morning. The house is getting kind of full, to the point that we really should observe a conservation of mass law, where for every new non-consumable item that comes into the house, something else of equal volume should leave. Beth thinks we need a bigger house, I think we just need less stuff. I'm not helping matters with my 6000+ comics and a couple thousand books and several hundred CD's, but their uniformity of size allows them to occupy a relatively small amount of space. Now every Christmas the number of cubic inches left to move around in inside the house decreases a bit, but it's only because we're all, including the kids, interested in different areas, a diverse array of things, and having an interest means having some collection of tangible artifacts of that interest around you, and, if the alternative is to be interested in nothing and just watch tv all day, then I'd say that a relative lack of breathable space is a small price to pay. Here's looking forward to more (and more diverse) pursuits in the years to come. God bless us every one.