Part 2, Christmas Week

The Christmas tale continues. Here's the first installment.

TUESDAY: Christmas, of course! We woke up at 9 and moseyed downstairs once my mom had passed us. We don't do Santa much anymore, as the Brother is going to be eighteen in a few weeks. My mom does fill the stockings with little gifts, though, like wind-up toys and Christmas candy (Daddy fills her stocking with Lindt chocolates and scented soaps). Inexpensive fun things. This year was kind of lame because Daddy was down watching TV when we woke up, and then we sat around waiting while my mom put breakfast in the oven and they watched MORE TV- and not even something Christmasy, they were watching a robot movie. Grr. But they stopped when Mummy and I finished making breakfast and we opened the stocking gifts, all wrapped in tissue paper. Then, as breakfast cooked, we started the other family presents-- I gave my sister a scarf, my brother a book about numbers, my dad a bottle of special olive oil and my mom a little cosmetic bag for her purse (she needed one, her old one broke) and an organic candy bar.

My parents gave me lots of stuff-- this is what they do instead of buying me stuff I need or want at other times. So I got a Leatherman tool, and plush microbes from ThinkGeek (syphilis, malaria and mono), and Age of Mythology for my computer because I am a myth geek and have wanted it for years but couldn't afford it. And I finally got a new hair dryer to replace the one that broke. Shrewd's making me a scarf but she's been sick and couldn't finish it in time. I don't mind, though. The Brother gave Daddy a collection of Agatha Christie movies, including The Man in the Brown Suit, which is a movie that Daddy taped off the TV years ago, but which was then accidentally taped over by Shrewd. Daddy loved it and was disappointed as hell. He was thrilled, as was Shrewd, who is FINALLY out of the doghouse.

Soon breakfast was done. Christmas breakfast for us is almost as big as dinner. The traditional family Christmas breakfast is an egg casserole (part veggie and sausage, part sausage only, part veggie only), cinnamon rolls hot from the oven, homemade tea breads and fresh-squeezed orange juice. We finished presents after breakfast, then cleaned up the wrapping paper so that the house would be ready when Ryter arrived.

Ryter came soon after, and we talked and helped with dinner until it was time to eat. Dinner was tenderloin with peppercorn sauce and stuffed scrod with Newburg sauce; sweet potatoes, my mother's famous cloverleaf rolls, peas, broccoli, shrimp cocktail, sweet baby carrots and probably something else I forgot. It was wonderful, as my mom's cooking always is, even without the traditional popovers Shrewd usually makes (she was too sick to handle food safely).

Ryter opened my gift and I opened his; I gave him a T-shirt of Emperor Constantine Paleologos and he gave me a collection of Phillip K. Dick novels. My parents also gave him some maps of the White Mountains for hiking in the spring, and he gave Daddy a bottle of rum, for general over-21 consumption. The Brother and Daddy played with their new mini RC helicopters.

After we cleaned up from dinner we played Trivial Pursuit (Daddy and Mummy against the Brother, myself, and Ryter) and my team lost miserably. They got lots of easy questions. We had pie and cheesecake for desert and split up, Shrewd playing with her brand new laptop (boy did she need it), the Brother and Daddy playing Scrabble and Mummy setting up her new vacuum cleaner from my grandmother, while Ryter and I hung out, watched some Bones, and then said our good nights.

It was a marvelous Christmas all around.

"Of all the creepy gross fish-monsters on this planet, you are apparently the hottest."

Today was rough. Some heavy books about pirates fell off a top shelf and hit a little boy on the head, so there was much rushing about and getting of ice and getting of ice packs from the staff first aid kit which made a lot more sense. Bah.

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It took me half an hour to figure out that the toy in the picture at right is called a Water Wiggler (finding the picture took another ten minutes). I feature Water Wigglers today because they are one of the more interesting toys featured at the Discovery Channel store, and we have plastic balls filled with fake bloody eyeballs.

You may remember that I have a quest to mock modern toys. Alas, this is not really a modern toy. I used to love these things as a kid, because they're squishy and they slip out of your hands when you try to hold on to them. They're totally pointless. They do nothing. If a kid actually owned one instead of just playing with the ones in the store, they'd get bored of it post-haste.

I wouldn't have thought anything of them except that I happened to see a pink one end-on. I thought, Hmm, that looks kind of weird, but chalked it up to my gutterbrain and moved on. Then I saw someone put their hand into the middle and push it back and forth on their hand idly, and now, I can't look at the damn things without thinking that it's creepy that a children's toy resembles something I saw featured on Talk Sex (I was...flipping through channels...).

On the other hand, I'd buy my kid a Water Wiggler before I'd buy them a Bratz doll. No child would ever understand why it's weird. I'd probably also buy them a Water Wiggler before I bought them the fake bloody eyeball bag. Or the box of sticky dismembered body parts. You know, girl's toys are increasingly sexual, but boy's toys are just nasty.