Christmas

This year we decided to find a central place for Christmas, a place as close to equidistant from each of us as we could get.  After a good deal of drawing overlapping circles, we settled on a house in southwestern Pennsylvania.  It was located on a river, at the edge of several park areas, near lots of good hiking and, most important, big enough for all 9 adults and 3 children.

Best of all, it came with a moose head on the dining room wall.  That thing was so big I had a hard time  believing it was real.  But it got very friendly when we decorated the antlers with all the 12 Christmas stockings.  [I would insert a picture here but I'm having my usual computer issues.]

There was a Christmas tree, too, all decorated and ready.  The kids added homemade ornaments thanks to Nate's bringing lots of pipe cleaners, construction paper, beads, scissors, etc.  There were also paper chains (one of my personal favorites form my own days of making ornaments) courtesy of Aunt Becca.  The three littlest kids developed an activity they called "reading the presents" which involved checking the to and from and then arranging and rearranging them in different groups.  Lots of planning by those three went into Christmas morning.

Other days included walks, snowboarding for Nate, and ongoing and rotating games.  Some of the old faves like checkers, new ones like Forbidden Island and Catan Junior, and, of course, for this group, hand and foot.  Hand and foot is a card game that involves five or six decks of cards and lots and lots of shuffling.  It has just enough luck and just enough strategy and just enough table talk to keep the game going on at intervals through the whole vacation, with much high fiving by various parties at various times.

As Nate's father, Ron, put it so accurately, "This is the best Christmas ever, until the next one."