Winter Break, Part 2

Well, merry belated Christmas everybody, and happy belated birthday to myself! This has been an unusual Christmas week for me -- I had sinus surgery on Monday, made my semi-decadal birthday trip to Newton-Wellesley Hospital on Tuesday, and mercifully don't have any more major medical care scheduled for a few days. As you might imagine, it hasn't been a terribly active week for me. I spent most of Monday sleeping and on some great drugs, and most of Tuesday hoping I wouldn't develop a horrible nosebleed after I took off my super attractive hospital mask (sorry). I'm doing really well though, now, I haven't needed to take the pain meds since Monday and nothing surprising has come out of my nose (sorry again). My family did a good job keeping my spirits up this week, and yesterday was an especially enjoyable Christmas. Because of my recovery, Mom and I didn't sing at mass at all (I missed all of Advent which I'm surprisingly bummed about), so we got to spend our time all together. After we opened presents on Christmas morning, we went to see the Mandela movie (not bad, could have been longer, put Idris Elba in all the movies please), then had the traditional dinner at a Chinese restaurant. The best part of the day was watching a Rick Steves' European Christmas special, during which we all took turns doing various European accents and making fun of hilarious European Christmas traditions.

There's one other thing I'd like to say about our family's Christmas traditions. Every year, my parents, partly out of a desire to offend our neighbors, and partly because we all have very bad taste, decorate the house in the most unfortunate, half-ass way possible. Sure, we get the lights out, but all the strands have slightly different types of bulbs. My dad will decorate a tree in our front yard with a string of lights, but will give up halfway up the tree. Lights on the porch and over the garage are always somehow lopsided. The wreath on our front door has chiles on it. We have two light-up reindeer whose heads turn. In years past, we had a blow-up see-saw with, inexplicably, a penguin on one side and a snowman on the other. At one point, the snowman fell forward and it appeared that... well, I'll leave that to your imagination. This year my parents did not go all out decorating, although they did get some lights and wreaths up. Luckily, they're having work done on the front porch, so there's all kinds of furniture on the front yard, and our house still looks really low-class.