Merry Christmas

Maybe all of those guys are real and I'm an imposter.

 

I used to love taking advantage of that. Not even my holiday, but I got time and a half and I got to help out my co-workers.

 

Very nice Christmas in the jlee household. Woke up at 7 and got the coffee going. Read and did crosswords until Mrs. jlee woke up a few hours later. Long walk with the dog, time for the mimosas, and dinner prepped.

T-minus 5 minutes until the family (parents, brother & wife, niece, nephew) arrives for three days. Hence why my first paragraph was so boring; we’ll need the rest.

Looking forward to an insane week. Hope your Christmas is amazing, no matter how many folks can join you for it.

 

My duty to the last-minute shoppers of our county done, now enjoying pizza, cold beer and Lakers-Warriors. Well, except for the halftime score.

Merry Christmas to all in this little corer of the Internet that puts the fun in dysfunction.

 

Happy holidays y'all.

Typical holiday celebration. Even though technically, we're Jewish, we do the tree and Santa thing. Interesting part of the day was my wife, who keeps insisting my elderly parents need some sort of pet, even though they've said numerous times that they don't want one, got them two Beta fish and a small tank. My parents refused them, so now they're in my Oldest's room.

 

I had a print shop class in high school ('71) where I was taught typesetting on a linotype machine among other things. Is offset printing still a thing? Kudos to all of you who made journalism a career, happy holidays to you and yours.

 

I remember going through this with my mother for years after her dog died. She absolutely adored that dog, but never wanted another pet. I'm just happy that my wife listened and respected my mother's opinion on the subject. Glad the fish found another home.

 

Best gift: my father died in July, and my younger sister was the favorite. My father's old Army jacket was a POS with holes and patches of different color fabric covering some of the holes and it had to be put out of its misery. But before we did it, I made sure my mom salvaged the patches. We put them on an olive sweatshirt for my sister and she said it was the best gift ever.

I also gave her a dump truck full of rocks. It's to help fill her driveway because it floods and when it floods people can't haul their horse trailers in and therefore she loses money because she can't train them. Sometimes it's not enough to know how to fish. you gotta have a fishing pole, too. Merry Christmas!

My nephews got Star Wars shirts with Arabic script. Not as cool as rocks, but the look on my fake niece's face when she opened the nunchuks was priceless, too.

 

Happy holidays to those who celebrated, are celebrating, and will celebrate.

Did the bookflod thing with my mother and some friends. Santa brought my elderly Katrina rescue string cheese. Exchanged greetings with exes and a couple of ohs. This week and most of next I am on triage/crisis duty. I've come to appreciate that sometimes the merriest and brightest is also the quietest.

 

It's funny you posted this. I was actually thinking of starting a thread asking what gift people got that they were happiest with, or most excited, or most surprised or absorbed by.

For me, it was a book -- a big coffee table book, actually -- called "The Travel Book: A Journey Through Every Country in the World," published by Lonely Planet, which, apparently, prints many of these types of things about the world/travel, etc.

I didn't ask for it, didn't know about it, and was happily surprised by my sister getting it for me. And, sure enough, I found myself absorbed in it, looking through it, already trying to pick out another place where I could go next time I want to travel. The best thing about it is, it has among the listed features for each place/every place a suggested published book about that locale/region, so that, even if you never get there, you might feel like you've been there if you read that book.

 

Best gift: My daughter has started baking and made me a whole batch of cookies that my grandmother used to make. I haven’t had them in some 15 years, and she hit the recipe dead on the screws.

My diet will wait a couple of days.

 

Oh, lucky you...

Growing up, we kids looked forward, every year, to a tin each of my paternal grandmother's butter or chocolate-chip cookies -- our choice. Most of us, including me, chose her butter cookies, and it was always the simplest but most-favored gift of every Christmas.

She passed away in 1980 after a nine-year battle with cancer that was only supposed to last a year. But to this day, her cookies are still missed, and talked about, quite often, around Christmas time. Her recipe, unfortunately, was never shared, and was lost with her, and that has been lamented ever since. None of us have ever had butter cookies like hers.

We wonder why, of course, because it's not like there's that much to butter cookies, and my mom has given making some a try. But Nana's were the best, hands down. There has truly been no replacing them.