Random Christmas vacation happenings

[primeideal]

• • My mom retired last spring from her career as a Lutheran pastor. So she's been giddy about "this is the first time in thirty-seven years I don't have to work on Christmas Eve/Day?! I can sit in the pew with my family? I don't have to drive home from work in the middle of the night with the BBC on?!"
  • Part of the unofficial rules of pastoring is that, for the first year or so after your retirement, you can't go back to worship at the church where you used to be a pastor--otherwise the congregation will just come to you and not give the new person a chance. So she and Dad have been going to a different church every week and critiquing their liturgy over brunch.
  • Of course Dad got a bad cough/fever as soon as we were all home and wound up quarantining in his room for a couple days D: He took several tests and it was not COVID, but there's enough vigilance/paranoia in the extended family that he skipped most of the Christmas Eve/Day festivities with them.
  • Mom, trying to prevent germ spread, pulled out some napkin rings from years ago. "Who's the zebra, who's the lion, who's the elephant?" "I have no idea what I was a couple decades ago but I want the zebra." "I think Dad was the rhino but brother-in-law has that now, Dad can be the lion." "Because...he loves cats so much?" (He is allergic to cats.)
  • We went for a walk in a nearby park that gets lit up with lanterns and a little bonfire at dusk. On the way back, there was a horse (accompanied by a couple humans) standing in the street, decorated with Christmas lights. Of course Mom wants to make a friend, so she brakes, rolls down the window, and the horse comes over and sticks its head in. "Hello! Are you helping Santa Claus this year? The reindeer not cutting it?"
  • I'm not saying that all the Lutherans know each other, but. The place where we went for Christmas Eve had a 2020 supplement to the hymnal with a bunch of new hymns. Two people in the author/composer index are people I have met. So I asked my mom "how many of these people do you know?" "I know him, my former colleague likes her, this guy was my choir director in college...this guy is playing the organ right now..." "Seriously?!" "This guy is also a musician at this church, he alternates with the guy who's playing now..."
  • One of the standout gifts: my brother got a garden bench for my mom, who loves to garden. "I can use it as a stool to sit on if I need a break, and then I can turn it over and kneel on it when I'm working, and it also has handholds to help me stand up! This is great for old people!"
  • Brother-in-law's dad owns a record store. Stashed in some back closet was an old-school metal lunchbox with very old-school stickers/logos from various baseball teams. (Including the Cincinnati Redlegs, when they were going through their anti-communist phase.) Sister and brother-in-law were like "oh yeah, primeideal definitely needs this." Score!!
  • Christmas Day we went to my grandpa's church, he was a communion assistant and is in astonishing physical and mental health for 101. (He'd recently had some health issues, but after a couple tries the doctors were able to get him on medicine that really worked well, so fingers crossed.)
  • There's an enormous glass window in that sanctuary and there was just a deer hanging out, watching us during communion.
  • Reading some nonfiction and taking notes on larger-than-life historical characters, just in case. It's hard to plot an RPF sedoretu AU when it's like, "okay, we know when these two met, and we know when these two met, but how would all four of them get together in a world where it's normal to wait for a foursome? How do we know so-and-so wouldn't have found another group first? I mean, he had chemistry with everybody..."
  • Extended family gatherings can be overwhelming, particularly when certain relatives have their dogs off the leash and running around everywhere...I do love the humans (and most of the time I also like them), so it's worth it.
  • The youngest cousins-once-removed are three and one. One-year-old able to say "Grandpa" for her great-grandpa, very sweet. Three-year-old brother got a toy "grill" for Christmas and was playing with it. "Can you make us some carrots? Some fish? Thank you!" One-year-old toddled over. Three-year-old getting tired and needs a nap: "Baby got food!" As an older sibling myself, I sympathize, I've been there.
  • Last year, my mom got me a magnetic poetry game that had been heavily advertised on Facebook or somewhere. We tested it out and found it underwhelming; maybe my friends and I are just too snobby to like the subjective, Apples-to-Apples kind of scoring, and/or maybe the words we wound up with were just too crude. This year, my cousin and his wife got something very similar, or maybe the exact same product, for their (teenage) kids. It turned out to be a lot more fun this time around! One of the categories was "the most flattering compliment you can give the previous judge," which was me, and it's like...let's take a picture of this to send to me whenever I have low self-esteem. ;)
  • Lots of other board games, mostly with Mom. Ticket to Ride, Azul (I sometimes brain fart and make illegal moves, but she's like, "oh I am often brainfarting, this makes me feel better"). She greatly enjoyes the Kathleen Edwards song "It's Christmastime (Let's Just Survive)" which features the immortal lines "You have a meltdown when we play Scrabble/It's not my fault you're always left with vowels." Sure enough, playing Scrabble with Dad and me, she was the last person to pick up tiles, and ended up with AAOOUU (but still won!)
  • A lot of Codenames, both Duet and original. My brother searching the internet for a one-word clue: "Plumbism 2"? Hmm...Lead is Pb on the periodic table, Lead and Disease! Mom, more than once, giving illegal clues by inadvertently blurting out something on the board. Church nerd clues: "Elijah 2." "Um....he heard an EARTHQUAKE...and he was in a CAVE at the time." "See, this is why it's great playing games with you, most people would not get that." Thinking out loud. "Congress? Well, they're supposed to work as a TEAM...they're supposed to keep the PENTAGON informed of things...they're not supposed to sling MUD, but..."
  • I have. Opinions about Rian Johnson which I'll spare you. But by and large we mostly liked the new Knives Out, especially Father Jud. When he got to "behold the cross on which was hung the salvation of the whole world" my mom laughed and changed the next line from memory :D
  • Escape room for New Year's Eve! We didn't do very well--it was one of those "there's so many details, this could be anything."
  • Early afternoon it had felt like "I don't know if I'm gonna make it to midnight," but after that, it was like, we want to redeem ourselves puzzle-wise, so Mom and I worked through the special puzzle issue of the New Yorker--various word games, a crossword with a few "one letter off" clues, and even a mini Stephen Sondheim-themed cryptic! So that definitely gave us a second wind.
  • And then we did a WSJ cryptic a few days later. Very fun to have someone else to share those with.
  • Trying the park walk again, with Dad this time. Saw deer out past the bonfire, then heard owls hooting!
  • Going to a waterfall downtown. Dad found an app that was trying to make a "scavenger hunt" out of the park walk, but we were a couple decades too old for the target audience. Frozen waterfall was pretty stunning though.
  • IDK I'll probably remember something else later and edit that in, it was good times.