post christmas musings 2005

Well, it's pretty much all over for another year...

Presents opened, turkey consumed, season greetings exchanged, the whole nine yards...

Although technically Ma and I have another "Christmas" to go to today... Ma's sister's first ex-husband and his wife... don't ask...

Anyway, let's recap on the events of yesterday, shall we...

I was awake by around 6:30 am, finally forced myself to get in the cold, cold, cold shower, was dressed and loading the car up with Ma's presents and other assorted stuff by around 7am, and was on the road shortly thereafter... There is no other experience quite like driving at 7am on Christmas morning... I think I saw a grand total of about 8 cars, and it's about a 30-40 minute drive...

On the way down I kept looking at the big grey clouds thinking, "It's going to rain... it's going to rain on Christmas... far out"... it never did though.

Got to Ma's around 7:30ish and after she dashed out to wish me a perky Merry Christmas, complete in her traditional red Christmas t-shirt (it has an embroidered Christmas tree on it... it's kinda tacky, but kinda cute), and schlepping all the stuff out of the car into her house, we did our traditional Christmas breakfast.... croissants... it's quick, it's easy, it doesn't fill you up given the food orgy that usually follows...

Normally either before or just after breakfast we would trundle down to my cousin's place to throw presents at her rugrats and wish them all appropriate season whatnots (I like doing it early because it avoids other members of the family I'd rather not see, and it gets it out of the way early, and we always have the excuse that we have to go back to get the turkey on), but this year she had other plans, so guess it will be another 12 months before I see them...

Anyway, after we finished breakfast we traded a couple of presents (my new (Versace) eyeglasses for me, and a big box of Terry's Chocolate Orange Segments for her), got the Weber Kettle BBQ ready (the one and only time we use it during the year, but it saves the kitchen being hot all day), and came back inside to open a couple more presents.

Originally we had planned to space them out a little more... maybe open a few, do something else, open some more, etc... but it never works out that way...

We did end up stopping eventually... to put the turkey in the barbeque... but then we finished the last of the presents...

And I said it was going to be a DVD Christmas... well, technically, The Other Andrew said it, but I totally agreed with him... not only did Ma get the big pile of DVD's I bought her, but she'd also bought herself some "from Santa"...

But because we'd basically been putting DVD's away for Christmas since about October, I had the motherload...

• 10 Things I Hate About You
• The African Queen
• The Bourne Identity
• The Bourne Supremacy
• Call Me Claus
• The Fifth Element
• From Hell
• Futurama, Season 1
• The Golden Girls, Season 1
• The Goonies
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
• Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
• Little Shop of Horrors
• Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
• Mallrats
• Tarzan
• Van Helsing

Seventeen titles in all, although Futurama is a three case set, Golden Girls is a four disc set, and a few of the others were double disc special editions. So, basically, lotsa discs...

I also got a big ol' pile of books... the sixth Harry Potter, three Terry Pratchett Discworld novels, Ark Angel by Anthony Horowitz, Caught Between Two Worlds by Scott Russell Hill and Matthew Reilly's Hover Car Racer. There was also a food hamper full of cool stuff like Oreos, Mrs Fields Cookies and Lindt Chocolates (as well as a more prosaic bag of food with Cheerios and orange juice)... as well as my Boys Will Be Boys Calendar (I haven't decided what I'm doing with the For The Boys one, since Amazon sent me an email to say they'd sent me two by accident, and that I didn't have to return it... but I haven't gotten the second one yet).

And yes, I did get socks for Christmas... at my request actually... all my walking has kind of eaten holes in all the socks I used to have, so I really needed some more.

After the orgy of giving was over, Ma and I just kind of hung out watching Golden Girls until the turkey was ready. I had forgotten how much I loved that show! A big thanks to Jevyeddy, because he'd mentioned buying the DVD a while back, which brought it to my attention... now I need to get the rest of the seasons when they come out.

Eventually the turkey was ready (we had some trouble, for the first time in all recorded memory, one side of the coals actually went out, so it was only getting about half the heat it should have been), and I set the table and whathave you while Ma did the veg and carved the turkey... it was a whole system we had down...

With the turkey, the sausage meat (as I mentioned before, a big favourite of mine) and the bacon (as well as the ham in my breakfast croissant), I think I possibly consumed more meat products yesterday than I would normally consume in a week...

Oh, and we all know that Christmas teevee is bad, right? Well, I think I found either a new all time high, or low, depending on your viewpoint... SBS was screening 1964's Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.... and yes, it was about as bad as it sounds...

After lunch we watched Call Me Claus, one of the DVD's Ma got me... luckily she got it as a joke, because... well... a made-for-teevee movie starring Whoopi Goldberg (who I love) and Nigel Hawthorne (who I also love, the big homo) where Nigel, who's Santa, has to convince Whoopi, doing her best Scrooge impression, that she's going to be Santa for the next two hundred years... so, yeah...

While not quite as bad as the Martian trainwreck, it proved once again that Whoopi makes some crappy career choices...

Then there was more Golden Girls (love ya Dorothy "Pussycat" Zbornak!)... followed by the ritual "picking at the leftovers" for dinner...

I finally dragged my ass home at about 9:30pm, sorted out my presents, hung up my new clothes, and was about to crash when I came back into the bedroom only to see a cockroach the size of a small housecat climbing up the wardrobe.... URGH YUCKY! I sprayed it with about a quarter of a can of spray, then got the bright idea to throw it in the toilet... which I think just washed the spray off it... I had to flush about four times, AND empty the last of my bottle of bleach on it before it finally disappeared down the S bend.

It goes without saying that I left the toilet lid down all night...

But all in all it was a good Christmas... it's only ever Ma and me, so it's never really a bad Christmas, but yesterday was pretty good.

Hope everyone else had as good a day...

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