So Christmas has come and gone, though I’m still in Massachusetts soaking up the crazy North Shore wilderness (as well as a wide variety of booze). Friday afternoon, Chris and I piled into a big friendly Volvo with my brother and his girlfriend for what ought to have been about a four hour drive, but - it being 23 December, after all - it ended up taking about seven and a half hours. That’s not to say I wish we’d taken the train, because when you take the train you don’t get to listen to the 80s station on Sirius and stop at a diner in Connecticut for a burger and some truly excellent onion rings.

Christmas Eve was the usual frenzy of wrapping and cooking and decorating, and it was as fun as it always is. I managed to wrap my last present well before supper, a new record (as long as you don’t count the years I didn’t leave all my wrapping until Christmas Eve). Chris was suitably awed by our dirt roads and lack of city noise, I think.

And the day itself was lovely - we tore through all our carefully wrapped presents fairly early in the morning, and I came away with quite a pile of phat lewt. I have a satisfyingly weighty stack of books to take back to New York with me, and am once again grateful that I belong to a family of voracious readers. There were several instances of one person receiving the very same book they had given someone else moments before, but luckily no instances (that I’m aware of) of someone getting multiple copies of the same thing.

Today we’ve been in cleanup and recovery mode; I ventured out to the mall with my brother and his friend George, thinking we might see a movie, but we were too daunted by the flocks of mall teens. And the fact that everything we wanted to see was sold out didn’t help, either. But we ended up eating through sixty tons of pistachios while watching Hellboy from the comfort of our couch at home, which weren’t bad at all. I love me some demons, I tell you what.

And now I’m off for dinner - I hope you all had as nice a weekend as I did, and will talk to you soon.