Feliz Navidad!

Wow, my sister is so amazing. All I had to do was make a semi-blatant comment that she hadn't gotten me the pictures, and POOF! There they were.

(Along with a shameless plug for her Amanda Goes to England blog. Go to the comments on the Boxing Day post, and follow the link from there. And leave her some comments - she won't think you're weird or anything.)

So, without further ado:

We had a candlight service Sunday night, and afterwards went to mom's house. We ate until the world looked level (well, I mostly had raw veggies, and had a sloppy joe, but that's another matter) and had a great time remembering the holidays when we were kids. Eventually, we got to Anna Marie's favorite part: the presents.

Since mom is still pretty much chair-bound, I took over the job of official present hander-outer.

One of the best parts of the evening was the Christmas crakers. No, silly, not small pieces of dough made to look like ornaments. You know, those things you pull, and they explode, and you get a tissue paper crown, some small trinket of a toy, and some jokes for your trouble.

Here is the official Raney-Turner-Thompson Christmas Cracker Photo:



From left: Dad, my sister-in-law Lindsey, my brother Jeremy, Aunt Debi, Anna Marie, Amanda, and Jason.

Festive, no?

We had lots of fun. Dad had the job of sitting in a corner, having his picture made with random family members.

Like my Aunt Debi.



And me!



(Dude, those are some SERIOUS bags under my eyes!)

And here is a close-up picture of Lindsey and Jeremy. Even though they live in the same town we do, we don't get to see them very often.



And yeah, we did actually get a picture of mom too, this time with Aunt Debi.



We went back home, finished lighting our Advent candles, and went to bed. Thankfully, Anna Marie didn't get up until about 8 a.m. I guess she was tuckered out from the celebrations of the night before.

We opened our presents to ourselves, and got our stockings. My favorite present was a circle pendant that Jason got me from QVC. Anna Marie's favorite, hands down, was the Dora scooter my mother-in-law sent back with us at Thanksgiving. She's basically not gotten off of that thing since yesterday morning, and has ridden it all over our hardwood floors.

My family came over for lunch yesterday, and we had a smoked pork shoulder (yes, we're from Memphis, and we had barbeque for Christmas dinner) along with some leftover turkey and dressing from the auction. Oh, and my aunt made her ex-mother-in-law's fruit salad, and that stuff is addictive, my friend.

So we had a good Christmas, right up until the part where Jason couldn't find the keys to our extra car, and we spent an hour and a half looking for them, and the evening disentigrated into a pretty nasty argument.

Yeah, good stuff.

Turns out the keys had fallen into a gift bag we'd taken to mom's. Wish I'd have known that before I went to the trashcan (already at the curb for today's pickup) and got the bag out with the wrapping paper, and dumped the whole thing out onto my kitchen floor, just to be sure that we hadn't accidentally thrown the keys away.

All's well that ends well, I suppose.