December 23-26, 2012

With it now being the Christmas season, I'm going to remember what I can about the goings on of last year.

December 23. We went to sacrament meeting, but then we came home to get ready for our long drive. We heated up microwaveable sandwiches and loaded up the car. We had to drop Allie off at her house, and then we proceeded to drive. My mom wanted to listen to Messiah, so we put the CD in. As we were driving west, I began dozing off. My dad apparently couldn't stand the last song on the CD--ten minutes of a falsetto voice singing "He was despised and rejected of men..."--because he turned it off and turned the radio on. I wanted to listen to religious or semi-religious CDs that day, since it was Sunday. We listened to various MoTab CDs, and we wondered why there was a tunnel in the middle of the desert. My mom liked the Jenny Philips CD (which I find rather *meh*), but my Lower Lights CD wouldn't work. Eventually we stopped in Winnemucca, NV, and found a hotel to check into. My parents have become accustomed to sinning and breaking the sabbath when they're on vacation--we decided to go someplace for dinner. I said I wanted to go to Jack in the Box, because I thought they would have Christmas shakes. We went, and I got an eggnog shake. My dad asked me how I knew that, and I told him it was because I went to Jack in the Box in 2009 in Washington. We went into our hotel room, and I pulled out my laptop and wrote a blog post. I think I had some of the gingerbread cookies I had made that week, and we watched the MoTab/King's Singers concert. I took off my shoes and put them by the bed (and then forgot them in the morning).

December 24. We got up early to keep driving to California. I think there was a dusting of snow on the ground. We passed where someone had slid off the road, and another person tried to flag us down, but my dad didn't see him and kept driving. The man waving us down had a look on his face like "Who do you think you are?" We had to drive over Donner Pass, which was kind of scary because it was snowy. It was very pretty--lots of snow-covered pines--but scary. Lots of people were stopping on the shoulder to install tire chains. Dirty snow got all over the car, and the rear window was so caked with mud that we couldn't see out of it.

We kept listening to Christmas music, and my mom told me that she liked Lady Antebellum but she didn't like the Lower Lights. We eventually got off the mountain and got into California. We cleaned off the rear windshield at a gas station and went to Carl's Jr. for lunch. The cashier was an old lady who asked us where we were from. I got a jalapeño burger, and she intentionally mispronounced it "juh-LAP-uh-no." While we were driving, we got a call from Preston (or maybe I had to call). He seemed surprised to hear me on the phone. Then Baby wanted to talk to me--he told me the ABCs and counted on the phone. He kept talking, and it was hard to understand. My dad said to my mom, "He must be talking to Baby." Eventually we got to Dave and Ya-ping's house. Preston and Baby seemed excited we were there, but Franklin was indifferent. We were sitting in their house with the door open, and their landlord just walked in. It was a little uncomfortable. Later, my mom and Ya-ping and I went shopping at Target. When we got out of the car, I wrote "Merry Christmas" in the mud on the car. We looked at Christmas candy for stockings, and I wanted a box of Christmas Dots for mine. We bought a ham and supplies for funeral potatoes. We got eggnog, since David likes it. I think we got peppermint white chocolate M&Ms and peppermint marshmallows. We went home and had to take Dave to work, so we all piled into the Suburban, because we were going to take the boys to the temple visitors' center. Baby was in the back trying to get my attention, but I didn't know it until David told me. He wanted me to hear him count: "One, two three, four, five, six, leven, eight, nine, ten, leven, eight, nine, ten!" (Apparently he thought seven and eleven were the same.) David asked Preston a math problem, and then he asked Franklin, "What's one plus one?" Preston then said, "What's one times one?" David said to Preston, "What's the square root of four?" "Preston said, "That's college stuff," and David said, "That's what you were doing to Franklin." We dropped David off, and I asked the boys if they wanted Christmas Tic-Tacs. I asked whether they wanted red or green. Then we went to the temple. The visitors' center was really busy, which we hadn't expected. Baby correctly identified the Christus statue as Jesus. The sister missionaries invited us to go on a tour, and one of the sisters said I looked familiar--she had probably seen me at BYU. We looked at some of the lights on the palm trees on the grounds. Then we went back and got David and went home. David showed the boys How the Grinch Stole Christmas! He hadn't realized that Chuck Jones had been involved on the special. I watched White Christmas--David asked why it was what I watched on Christmas Eve, and I said it was because it was longest. I had to turn the volume down for the boys; even Preston came out and said it was too loud. David talked to me during the whole movie. Then we went to bed.

December 25. The boys weren't like I was as a kid, getting up early to open presents. I think they got up after all the other adults (except me, since I like sleeping). I had some breakfast--I can't remember what it was, except there was eggnog. The boys came out and opened their presents. They got electric toothbrushes, but Baby just liked to play with his. He was quite pleased with his Thomas the Train underwear, and my mom was pleased with her Nexus. David turned on a Christmas Pandora station, and as it played Michael Bublé, I said, "I have this album." Baby and Franklin were both really nice and shared their candy with me. I even said to Franklin, "You don't need to share with me, because I have my own candy," but he said he wanted to share anyway. He liked my Rudolph pajamas and called the Abominable Snow Monster a yeti. It was a rainy day (I really hoped it would snow, even though I knew it was unlikely), and my dad went out to wipe off all the mud from the car. We had dinner of ham and funeral potatoes, and David was trying to get Preston to try the potatoes. Preston kept asking what it was, and David kept saying, "It's cheese!" I said, "It's potatoes," and David had a panicked look on his face and motioned to me not to say that. I didn't know that the boys had an aversion to potatoes, and Preston refused to eat them "because they had mashed potatoes in them." I will never forget the way David looked at me. I thought about saying, "There aren't any mashed potatoes in there," but I didn't know if it would work. David set up my new laptop for me. I wrote a memory post and texted my cousin Peter to let him know. I also got a text from Hanna, one of my horse friends. I wanted to see how my speakers worked, but mostly it was an excuse to play Christmas music. I played "Rock and Roll Santa" and "Monsters' Holiday," to which David said, "There's a Christmas version of 'The Monster Mash'?" I looked at funny Santa pictures on Awkward Family Photos, and I showed them to my mom. Baby saw one weird-looking Santa and said, "Is that Jesus?" He kept jumping around on my mom, going "Hi-yah!" I got out my camera to take a video, but this is what happened:
That night I watched It's a Wonderful Life.

December 26. The next morning we took down the Christmas tree, which was a poorly designed tree. Then we needed to go to the airport to pick up my grandparents. Nathaniel always liked to go for rides, so he went with us. When we got to the airport, he was in the backseat, and I'm pretty sure he was saying, "I hate you, Eter!" My mom thought he was saying, "I hear you." Then he said he wanted me to sit by him, so I got in the back. We must have stopped at the house, because my grandma was surprised there wasn't a tree for the boys, and we just explained that we had taken it down. We took my grandparents by the Oakland temple, where a girl was having her Quinceañera. We went to dinner with my grandparents and with Baby. I remember feeling sad looking at all the Christmas trees and knowing Christmas was over for another year. That night I switched my Christmas pillowcase to a New Year pillowcase.