Merry Christmas!

Yes, I am a couple days late on the Christmas greetings, but better late than never, right? We had Christmas Eve Day off from work, so I baked cookies for my neighbors, cleaned the front sitting room, and did laundry before going to the Christmas Eve candlelight service at the base chapel. The service was beautiful, and I saw a lot of people I knew - even the wing commander was there with his family.

Christmas Day was wonderfully busy. Jose and Janice invited everyone over for dinner at 3pm, so my family and I planned to have "Christmas morning" over Skype at 1pm my time (8am their time). I woke up early and finished putting my new futon together, baked 5 dozen pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, and whipped up a sweet potato casserole.

This was the first year I was not with my family for Christmas, which was sad, but through the wonders of modern technology, we were still able to watch each other open gifts via Skype video feed under Christmas trees on different continents. Thankfully, both my package of gifts for them and their package of gifts for me arrived in time for the big day. It was fun to watch them open the gifts I sent - even Oreo the cat got one!

Christmas was the occasion of so many of my favorite family memories growing up. For most of my childhood, it was spent in PA with grandparents and cousins. My sister Lisa and I always shared a bedroom, and this was even more fun when we got to sleep in the semi-finished basement of my mom's parents' house. There was a storage area full of games, including a pinball machine I played for hours. Lisa and I hosted dances for our Barbies, where Barbies and Kens swayed to Disney songs played over and over on a cassette player. We slept on cots in the basement, and of course I thought it was hilarious to rig Lisa's so that it would collapse when she sat on it. On Christmas morning, I would wake up early and then wake up Lisa, so we could anxiously wait together for the seconds, minutes, and sometimes hours to drag by until 8am when we were allowed to go upstairs and look at the tree.

Christmas afternoon and dinner was always at my dad's parents' house, where all of our cousins stayed. With six girls, Barbies were a constant presence, and Amy always made up the best stories for us to play with them. It's fun to think back on how the gifts, games, and interests changed as we grew up. One thing that never changed was sitting at the "kids' table" in the kitchen for dinner... Melanie was the only one of us who ever graduated to the adult table in the dining room. I think after that it just made sense space-wise to keep the other 5 of us in the kitchen, no matter how old we were. :) Then there was black forest cake (which all the kids thought was gross) for Grandpa's Dec 25th birthday, and so many different flavors of ice cream that I got to play waitress and write down what everyone wanted on a notepad. So many good times, I could go on and on down Memory Lane when it comes to Christmas.

This year, Christmas was at Jose and Janice's with my weather flight "family". The food was amazing, thanks to everyone bringing their specialties. We had great times and lots of laughter with each other and the kids. It was our last get-together before Kim deploys tomorrow, and one of the last before Robin/Bobby and Greg PCS in January, so no one was really in a hurry to leave. We played games, watched movies, played with the kids, watched football, etc. until almost midnight.

This week is going to be crazy at work with one of our fighter squadrons headed out the door for a deployment. I'm briefing a predeparture brief tomorrow morning, then departure briefs at un-Godly hours of the morning (really more like the middle of the night) on two other days this week, so I may be on a mids-type schedule. Nobody's really talked about New Year's Eve, but I am sure there will be a gathering somewhere. Looking forward to Penn State vs. LSU in the Capital One Bowl!