holly jolly

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas day.

Mine was great. Very productive. I finally made that pot of turkey chili, I colored my hair (as you could see from yesterday's greeting), and I joined my friend Anthony's family for dinner. His family is from Cleveland, and very much like my Toledo family. We all have big, informal holiday gatherings. There's no official sitting around a table; it's grab a plate, sit at the kitchen table, perch around the TV, gather in the dining room with the kids.... People casually arrive during a loose span of time and leave when it's time to go visit other folks. Just like I would've done at home if I needed to, I took my laundry along. (Couldn't pass up an opportunity to multi-task, and thankfully now I can pass up a laundromat.)

By the time I arrived, most people had eaten. One of the women Anthony is dating was there, and while I was eating and shooting the breeze with his family they left to visit her mom. Anthony's mom is a huge Cavalier's fan, and I settled in to watch them them play the Wizards with her and a few others. What that means is I did my laundry and started a knitting project and tried not to talk over the game too much.

Anthony and his girlfriend, whom I liked very much, got back while I was drying my last load. By then his parents had gone to bed, so the three of us talked for a while. Because the discussion centered on things like being an introvert versus an extrovert and how it plays out in relationships, Anthony said we were having a women's conversation, and he asked us if we didn't want to talk about something more aggressive. He's so funny. After he went to bed, his girlfriend and I played Urban Myth with her kids until we got too sleepy, then she helped me load my laundry into my car and I drove home. I got here at about 3am.

That was my holiday, mixed in with phone calls to relatives and much holiday smooching on Mira, who treated the day as if it was any other.