Well, I hope everyone had a good Christmas and/or Channukah. Santa brought me just what I wanted: checks! Hurrah! I'm planning to wait until MacWorld and its inevitable surprise announcements pass by, then take the plunge and spring for an iPod. What'd you kids get?

Aside from the crass materialism, there've been some other good bits: seeing old friends who're back in town; watching It's A Wonderful Life (moral: never trust the handicapped); getting smacked down at MarioKart by Jeff's ten year-old brother's irritating friends; and Jon starting a new Christmas Eve tradition, as we unscrewed a very festive bottle of Thunderbird, which, surprisingly, none of us had previously sampled (for the similarly uncultured: think rubbing alcohol and sugar).

And then there was the family. Tending to the holiday emotional needs of divorced parents gets old pretty fast, but my sister and I managed to fulfill our filial duties without going completely crazy. Christmas Eve dinner with our Dad, his girlfriend Nancy and our Grandmother was particularly nice. Grandma's a retired English teacher and foreign service wife with a fiery intellect and a lovely Vermonter demeanor. I'm incredibly fond of her. And although it's a bit sad to see her decline progressing -- the 24th marked the first time I've seen her tell a story, and as she wrapped it up, begin telling the same story again -- she's still doing pretty well for a dame in her mid-nineties. And they're all good stories, anyway.

Christmas Day was spent with my Mom and her boyfriend Ray, and they'd decorated a tree, put together a vast array of fun little wrapped things under it (all addressed from "Donner", "Mrs. Claus" and the like, just like when I was a kid), and generally let me regress as far back into my childhood as I could while simultaneously complaining about lower back pain. Plus, Mom's chestnut stuffing: oh man. It's one of those rare foods that takes more calories to prepare than it provides, but fortunately I wasn't the one doing the shelling. Between that and a bitchin' turkey, it was a tasty spread, and a great way to pass the day.

So Christmas was good, although I'm still smack in the middle of the age range where I'm a kind of familial free agent, which makes things a little awkward and embarassingly wistful. But life is resuming back at the apartment, and we're all trying to figure out what to do with ourselves for New Year's -- a holiday that's clearly better-suited to dissolute twentysomethings.