bunrab | Dec. 26th, 2005

We spent Christmas day with my brother and his family. ( a short digression on an atheist Christmas )
( oh, and Christmas trees: )
We gave G and Jen my hand-knitted slippers, and Jen a scarf as well, since she missed my scarf-making binge of a couple of years ago. That's pretty much all we're giving to most adults this year. But we are giving more presents to assorted nieces and nephews, in this case Jen's son. The two books we got him turned out to be appropriate for his age and developmental disability status; he didn't like the handmade hat but his mom did so he'll wear it! His best present, from his new stepdad, was a "Band in a Box" - a set of percussion instruments including a triangle, tambourine, maracas, cymbals, and a couple other wooden thingies. He can carry a tune and rhythm, and even a lot of the words, and so we all got to sing about 30 choruses of Jingle Bells with Joe on the triangle, and another few with Joe on the cymbals. His mom's going to hide the cymbals for outdoor use only!

( a small Christmas grumble: )

That said, we bought ourselves another 5 albums of Christmas music to add to our already-large collection. For some reason, we had not, before now, noticed Trout Fishing In America's Christmas album. And a couple of brass groups we didn't already have, Chris Isaak because I like his voice, and one of the Christmas Revels albums we had also heretofore overlooked.

Happy Boxing Day, everyone!