2 Days ’til Christmas

Garcia Family Christmas Photo, originally uploaded by elsaturnino.

Today was Christmas Eve Eve. Yes, I know it’s lame to call 2 days before some event as “eve eve” but it’s Christmas time so shouldn’t you be in a nice mood?

My sister and Dad came down to visit us for a bit today. Having forgotten to get them a gift we had to do some last minute shopping last night and this morning to rectify the situation. We didn’t really know what to get either of them but we settled on an 8 bottle wine cooler for Jenne—I’m talking about a refrigerator for wine, not those sweet alco-pop things that some women like—and a digital photo key chain for my dad. We were really excited for Jenne’s gift because we was sure she would love it but Dad’s gift was hard to gauge.

We didn’t really know what their plans were for the day so we didn’t know whether we had to plan to entertain them for the whole day or to expect them to stay over night. As it turns out, they really didn’t have any set plans either so after they showed up around noon we hung out for a bit before going down to visit Aunt Paula near the Mexican border. She invited us to Thanksgiving this year but we never made it there so we wanted to make sure to visit this time. Paula hasn’t changed much since we last visited (way back last Thanksgiving). As always she is a riot to be around and an excellent host.

We had planned on having Dad and Jenne stay with us for the night but Paula managed to convince them to stay there for the night since she had an extra room with two twin beds. I’m not sure if the twin beds really stand up to our awesome sofa bed but I guess having two of them made the difference. Colleen and I did want to fix dinner so we headed back up here for that and to open the gifts we got for each other.

The vegan chicken and stuffing casserole we made was alright but I put too much salt in the mushroom soup so, while Colleen loved it, I didn’t feel like the final result was the best. I don’t think Dad liked it much at all since there were a fair amount of onions in it and he hates onions. On a side note, the red onion we have been using lately has been extra-potent. I was under the impression that red onions were generally the mildest of the onions but that hasn’t been the case recently. Maybe I’ll have to go do more research on the subject (or maybe one of you chefs out there can correct me).

After our meal was complete, we started in our the gift unwrapping. Colleen opened her stuff from Jenne first and found a bunch of cool scrapbooking/card making supplies. She also had a cool “scrap tote” to put all her stuff in. She seemed to like it so +1 to me for making that gift suggestion to Jenne. Dad was up next and he seemed a bit confused by his gift. He recently got a new computer that has Windows Vista and it really has him flummoxed and not a huge fan of computers right now (I should try to put Ubuntu on his computer :-P). In any case, after a bit of explanation he thought it was cool and was excited to play around with it. Jenne’s wine cooler unveiling was next and she really seemed impressed by the gift (+1 to Colleen for coming up with that idea). Not sure if it tops the one Christmas I got her two (count em: two!) CD’s when she only got me a single crappy CD but it was cool nonetheless.

Oddly enough, I didn’t have any gifts for me and me alone but I did open the gift that Jenne got for both Colleen and I. I can’t say it was a huge surprise since we read the gift card on it and it gave it away. “What was it?” you may be asking right now. It was a 14 piece knife set from OXO (we love OXO) that we had our eye one. Score! We were getting really sick of the lame, dull knives we had so this gift was much appreciated.

That wrapped up the gift exchange though (get it? wrapped up… ha ha). Before Jenne and Dad headed back out we had them take some photos of Colleen, Rubi, Roxy, and me in front of the Christmas tree. I guess it is our official Christmas photo for the year. (Yes, that is the photo above.) You can see that as well as a couple other photos on my Flickr page.

I guess that is about it for this post. Colleen apparently has some gift that she really wants me to open in 19 minutes (i.e. right when it becomes Christmas Eve). No idea what it us but hopefully she’ll let you in on it when she writes her post tomorrow. Until then, farewell.

~ Sat

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