Christmas Vacation

Christmas 2014 is over, but I still have a week of vacation left and our children are still home.

Wreath is slightly off-center.  Par for the course.  So close, yet so far away, Madeleine.  And, what's with the unlit colored lights string?  Actually, this is an old picture.  The porch looked better this year.  Still, if I don't stop looking at Southern Living before the holidays, implement a suicide watch next November.

Elf ornament from my childhood Christmas tree
Elf on a Shelf's Grandpa

This was Jessi's fifteenth year of tearing wrapping paper off her Christmas stuffed animal with her teeth before gnawing it until the squeaker falls out and we have to snatch it up before she chokes on her gift.

We had Christmas morning at about two p.m., because first we had to go to the barn.

My French toast casserole was a triumph.  

The smell of spray starch evoked memories of 

Dessi ironing my older brother's Norfolk Catholic button down shirts 

and made ironing my mother's linen napkins feel like an honor.

Micah and Shuyang wrapping gifts

Watching Shuyang hang her first Christmas ornament was a great, but hearing her giggle at her first viewing of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation was even better.

David

Terry and Jessi

Blog Fuel

Heath Lee, author of an upcoming book about POW wives/fellow French fanatic/new friend, sent me a package of French treats - the book about Josephine, a small book about French style, and a pin - for no reason... just because she's awesome.

My brother, Michael, knowing my close ties with Virginia Beach, sent me a book that features VB postcards - very cool and sentimental.  

David, English major son and newly robed lawyer, who shares my love of words and compulsion (before I got lazy, bc no one reads my words anyway) for finding just the right word, gave me Garner's Modern American Usage - sure to lead me to words that provide the satisfying mental click that occurs when I'm able to express myself exactly as I'd like. 

Micah, daughter who knows me like a well-read book, selected an assortment of especially significant blog posts - on family, horses, childhood, history - and had them made into a book. Nothing could have meant more to me both for the motive and the content.  She said all the time she spent putting it together was the reason she got an A and two Bs, rather than the three As she wanted, when grades came out.