Odds and Ends on the day after Christmas

Tis the day after Christmas and all through the house everyone’s happy. I suppose I could continue the rhyme, but that sounds like a lot of work. I’m disinclined to work today. So instead of rhyme, I’ll offer a few Christmas highlights.

This was the year of Nintendo shirts and Indiana Jones Lego sets. All four of my kids acquired multiple video game themed shirts from various different sources. This made all of them happy. They’ll continue to enjoy the clothes throughout the next year or more. The three younger kids all received Lego sets. It made for a very quiet Christmas afternoon since they each spent several hours assembling the sets. Hopefully they will continue to have fun playing with the sets over the next several days. Most importantly, Patch acquired the Motorcycle chase set he has coveted for months.

I loved watching the kids give gifts to each other. Each person has a pile of things that they are giving to others and there is much laughing and joking as the kids try to be the first to give everything away. This year it worked really well. The kids were excited to give because I’d involved them in the gift selection process. They worked to earn these gifts and were delighted to give them. Involving the kids more in gift selection was the right thing to do, even though it gave me less control over what things came into the house. In past years I’ve spent considerable energy to make sure that the holiday gift giving was optimized for the best use of financial resources. This year I let go. I left the choices of gifts up to the individual givers and somehow balance was achieved just as well.

Howard managed to surprise me with a new Dell mini laptop. I knew he was buying it, but he tricked me into thinking it would not arrive until after the holiday was over. I’m typing this entry from the new machine. It looks like it will be a very useful aid to writing. And it is small. About the size of a hardback book.

The perfect gift is the one you didn’t know existed, but once you open it, you realize you always wanted it. One of those gifts arrived for Howard today. It is amazing, but it is his story to tell. He blogged about it. With pictures.

It was a good holiday. We capped it off with Howard reading How The Grinch Stole Christmas by candlelight. It was a good ending to the day.