Hello readers,
I’m on vacaaaatiiooonnnn :). Life doesn’t get much better than this! The family and I just got back from watching the British Arrow Awards, a collection of excellent British commercials. Before that, we ate gyros at a local restaurant, and before that, we all went to the YMCA together for a group workout. We’ve been watching movies and TV shows every evening, eating gobs of food, having family over, messing around on the computer, reading books, and helping Leslie (my sister) apply to college. Like I said, doesn’t get much better than this.
It’s so nice being home with my family—I never realize how much I miss them (their humor, companionship, fun) until I return home. For an introduction to the strangeness that is Gates family life, I present you with Christmas 2013: a holiday tale.
Upon arrival in Minnesota (at 2 am in the morning—my flight was delayed as per usual :P) I remarked upon the fact that we didn’t seem to have a tree up. Not that there is much room in our living room for a tree—furniture seems to reproduce like very expensive bunnies in our household. Nevertheless, we usually do have room for the small plastic tree that we have graduated to (in earlier years we bought the live green ones). The reason for the transition is a common theme in this household: one part ecologism, many parts laziness.
The next day, my father roused my sisters and I with a battle cry to set up the tree. Many ornaments dwell in our basement, so it’s not as if we lack materials. Moreover, our plastic American tradition comes equipped with lights, so in fact the amount of work we would have had to was minimal. However, given the tense of the previous sentence, you can see that we did not end setting up the tree, due to the fact that like zombies we were all much too busy typing on our computers. Well, literate zombies, in that we spent much less time typing and much more time staring vacantly at various sources of online stories.
Never you fear, however, for my grandparents came to visit and they brought us a poinsettia plant. This was given the proud place of honor over our presents, which were at the time three massive brown boxes yet to be opened, several somewhat opened letters from relatives, and a distinct lack of wrapping paper. “We’ll go shopping tomorrow,” my father assured me. Given tomorrow was Christmas Eve, I was pleased to hear it.
The tree! Nicole and my dad, after we’d finished with the presents (uh, in the next paragraph)
On Christmas Eve, my mom went off to work and my dad packed the rest of us in the car. We drove through the perilous weather (it was in the negatives with wind chill) to our destination of choice: Target, of course, which conveniently lies a block away from Barnes and Noble. My mother had instilled a new tradition this year—she would give each of us ten dollars per family member to be used to buy presents. That meant my sisters and I each had $40 to run around with at Target, and we had about an hour to spend it.
This was a truly excellent gift by my watch, though I did have the inconvenient problem of not knowing what to buy. My sisters also had this problem, and so we settled on a practical solution. “Leslie, I want ear buds,” I informed my middle sister, and so we went off to the ear bud section together, I picked out what I wanted, and she deposited it in her arms (we had yet to get a basket at that point.) Nicole (my youngest sister) picked out a shirt for Leslie independently, and I picked out some pretzels secretly for Nicole, but the majority of our time was spent wandering up and down the food aisles, petting various items and looking yearningly over our shoulders, where our attentive family members picked up said items and dropped them in the (now acquired) basket.
We then scurried over to Barnes and Noble (in fact, we took the car. So much for the environment.) and I spent another half an hour choosing which “Futuristic Thriller Teen Novel” I wanted (some say it’s a guilty pleasure—I tell them that it’s just a pleasure, thank you very much) while my father went and fetched a very nice traveler’s journal. We paid at the counter after passing someone with eight gift cards all waiting to be filled and mailed off (a grand idea, that) and then took off for home again. Christmas shopping in two hours, baby, with much caroling and amusement and not the least amount of stress. Upon our return, I whipped out a Post-It, tallied up our purchases, and determined that in fact we were seven whole dollars under budget if we were a bit flexible with who owed whom what.
Can you guess what this is? It is very nicely wrapped. If you guess potato chips (BBQ, specifically) for my dad, you were correct!
Leslie wrapping presents
Christmas day didn’t begin until nine am, and unsurprisingly resulted in very few surprises. However, all of our presents were wrapped (Nicole is a fiend—I had her wrap her own apple juice because she was so much better at it than I was) and it was good fun tearing them apart and letting our cat Sheba hide underneath them. Moreover, I received a marvelous and unexpected gift—guess who’s going to be a smart-phone user? Monica is, Monica is! I am very excited to be joining my generation of tech-savvy iProduct consumers (actually, I just wanted the GPS, but having a mini-laptop at my disposal is not something I’m going to complain about!)
On Christmas, Leslie took control over the radio by noon, so my Christmas songs were abruptly cut short. This is not to say Leslie is not a fan of music, however—in recent days, she has dug up a monstrously huge pile of CDs from somewhere in the bowels of the house, and my iTunes has now tripled in capacity. Also in recent days, Nicole has taken over the mud room, but that has not stopped us from having involved conversations, such as whether human cheeks would make a good consumable. I feel like I never quite make it out of the house without having at least one conversation about cannibalism, though I do confess that I often start them.
Family is wonderful :). It is so nice being home, enveloped in our own idiosyncrasies, which have much less to do with Minnesota and much more to do with family. I wish to issue an eternal thank you to Tiffany’s family, who hosted me for a day between when Wellesley closed and my flight back to Minnesota, and am so grateful that they opened up their home to me and let me share in their holidays. I always say it’s so similar to my own household, and it is, but there really is nothing quite like home :).
Tiffany’s sister Patricia, Tiffany, and me in Quincy Market in Boston, before I left for MN. I had a truly wonderful time with them– their family took me to the Nutcracker, out to a Hot-Pot restaurant with them, spent hours chatting with me, played piano with me, gave me a bed to sleep on… my adopted family :).
Wishing the best to you all, readers, and much holiday spirit,
Monica