Holiday Catch-up #1

I realized last night that I haven't posted anything in several days, so here's a quick recap of the highlights:

After spending several days with my Dad's family in Lansing, I drove down to Anderson, IN to spend Christmas Eve Eve with Daniel's family (Carly was already there). The main goal of the day was to make gingerbread houses, by which I mean graham cracker houses. Now, Carly and Daniel have done this before, so their houses did not collapse at any point during construction. Me personally, I wildly overestimated the aerosol frosting's properties as an adhesive, and had one major redo to deal with. Unfortunately, Daniel's mom and brothers weren't left with much to show for their work other than a pile of delicious frosting coated graham. In any case, here are the results.

Carly's house.

Daniel's house. Notice the excellent smoke billowing out of the chimney.

Finally, my house. In case it doesn't look familiar to anyone, here's my actual house.

I built it from memory, and I dare, nay, defy anyone to throw together graham crackers, frosting, and mini M&M's and have it look more like the genuine article. Next year I'm thinking Frank Lloyd Wright.

Christmas Eve I headed back to Lansing, where we had our traditional dinner at my aunt Karen's house. What was new this year was that Dad, Jeanie and I went to midnight mass with Karen. I'm used to the Methodist midnight services that start at 11:00 pm, and are precisely timed to end right at midnight. This particular service started at midnight, and ran right through about 1:30. Since the Christmas proceedings started at 8:30, I only got about 5 hours of sleep.

To Be Continued!