Kipworld

All the reports of snow flurries on Christmas stayed in the fanciful dreams of the meteorologists. It was a green Dec 25th here in Milwaukee.

I didn’t post yesterday not because I was too busy to type but because there was this one time my siblings and I were playing You Don’t Know Jack on Christmas Day and the darn thing mocked us for having nothing else to do. I didn’t want to see if MovableType had the same feature. I’m guessing not, though.

So here’s the Christmas breakdown. Christmas Eve Day, we went to church early (the noon service) and it was baby time. It was just my mom and dad and I who went; we didn’t bring our family’s babies but it seemed like everyone else did. The noon service is for those parents who want to fit church in between their infants’ naps but it just didn’t quite work out. During the Silent Night ceremony (everyone has little candles that get lit from a single flame) these tykes were just bawling and their parents were thinking, “Just 5 more minutes, 5 more minutes.”

Usually the moral of the Silent Night thing is to show how spreading light can start from a single source but this year the pastor told us to see how quickly it could be extinguished as we snuffed them. Kinda depressing.

That afternoon, I went to the mall to get my last couple Xmas gifts. Got a good parking spot at the mall and then thew myself into the fray. Mayfair Mall is sort of a long complex with a cross section in the middle but I didn’t even pay attention to that little protrusion. Just went one end to the other, bypassing the department stores. Success.

That night was the big Xmas party and it was fun. I had kid duty in the basement briefly and I was taking pictures of my cousin Suzanna’s sons jumping up and down, trying to capture them midair. Somehow it turned into them mock attacking each other and then running around to me to see how it looked on the digital camera. Then their dad came down and told them to stop and I felt really guilty (to their credit, they didn’t say, “Uncle Kip said we could!”).

After everyone left, my parents and I waited until midnight to open the gifts we’d given each other and the gifts party guests had brought (we saved the gifts fro/from my sis and bro in law for Christmas Day). It was really quiet in the house, the waiting. I really missed my brother and the endless reserves of enthusiasm he usually brings to the Midnight Waiting. We opened, had some hugging and pictures and went to sleep.

The next day (Christmas proper) my mom went over to my sis’ to help with the babies and my dad and I trickled over later after waking up. That was more fun, watching my niece open presents (so many books) and ask that they be read or played with right then and there. My parents and I went back home to sleep while my sister got her family ready to go to her inlaws for their Christmas Day party. Ah, napping.

Then we too went over to Devin’s folks’ party, and enjoyed the great food and company of Devin’s family, including traditions like Christmas cracker pulling and the singing of the 12 Days of Christmas. Which brought to mind this year’s South Park Xmas Special (so funny. so wrong.).

Caught a movie and then came back home to eat leftovers.

I told El that we were going to have to start young couple practice of being at one family’s home for alternating holidays. She said that she didn’t think she could pull me from mine. I remember how we always berated people for missing Xmas. Like the year my sister went to visit cousin Darren in NJ. Or the time we all were in Florida (it’s not Christmas without the possibility of snow! Or this house.) But this year it was like something was missing.

If I were the type to graph my life, I might look at when Christmas stopped being a whole season and just became this two day affair. This isn’t one of those “remember the reason for the season” type of things, I mean, I am happy about celebrating Christ’s birth. This year’s Xmas South Park “moral” section was pretty darn funny. And my 9th grade theology class taught us that Christ’s birth was probably in the spring based on several facts that I had to memorize for a midterm, but that it just matters that he was born, not really when, and if the church wanted to coopt the pagan Yule festival, that was acceptable. (Yay Jesuit education).

What I mean about Christmas not really being a season anymore is that our house gets filled for a night. That’s it. When I was growing up, we always had relatives or family friends staying with us. College students who didn’t want to go all the way home to Asia. We’d have so many people under the roof that I’d be relegated to the study to sleep (one year people slept in the basement, all huddled together for warmth). We’d play board games or cards late into the night (bedtime was thrown away while the guests were in town). The house would ring with laughter, with running feet (lots of pranks and retribution occurred).

Now those older kids are married; they live far away; they have their own lives. Heck, even my sibs have their own things to do. It’s hard to fill this house on my own.