So, I see you've survived the end of the world! (A funny way to look at the end of the Mayan calendar: Yeah, my calendar ended, too! On December 31st!)
Anyway, I've had a fantastic break so far, aside from the three extra days of break I received due to my stupid tonsils that appear to be strep magnets or something ridiculous. So that was disappointing because I didn't get to take my teachers their goodies and carefully baked gluten free cookies. 'Cause you know, I was sick and busy bein' miserable and puking 21 times in one day. I think that's the standing record for this family.
The Saturday before the actual Christmas was supposed to be Christmas with my mom's family but that got moved to the 27th due to my tonsils that suck. Nobody wanted to chance it because they get strep there all the time anyway.
Christmas Eve we were going to go to church but that got blown off due to the fact that my parents really wanted to go to Aunt Jenny's because my dad's sister and her husband and the twins from New York were there. And we have this tradition of having potato soup on Christmas Eve every year that we like so everything worked out.
I don't know if I've told you guys about the potato soup story, have I? Well, almost all my family is German, so that's where the story starts. They have lots of potatoes there and for the poor people, potato soup was what's for dinner. Potatoes, and cream, butter, cheese, plentiful staples. When my grandpa (I'm not sure how many "greats" he has by this point) came over on the ship to America, he got this stomach thing and had surgery to get part of it taken out (see how lucky? I hear the prospect of having surgery way back then wasn't very good.) and guess what he ate that was soothing and not painful to eat and reminded him of home. So the story goes and we like our tradition.
So after eating our potato soup we bundled up and drove to Jenny's to see everybody and my cousins who were home from college. Man, I love those people. It was good. Aunt Kim felt bad about not going to Christmas Eve church so she wanted my dad to read the Christmas story from the bible, which he did, and we sang Silent Night, and then Uncle Mike sang part of it in German which was hilarious.
We drove back to our house and I slept upstairs so we could all go down together in the morning.
7:30 in the morning, Esther gets up and wakes everybody up. "Everybody, it's Christmas! I want everybody up in five minutes!" And she's three. How cute.
It was magical. Esther got a ginormous Barbie house. I got a Wii Fit and the John Green boxed set (of books; too bad it wasn't a John Green boxed set with containing John Green!), and Abigail got two Wii games. Just to name a few. We hung out in our pjamas all morning and went over to the neighbor's to exchange gifts. They really are lovely people and I'm so glad they're our neighbors. They just had a baby and boy, is he cute when he's not fussy! I just wanna eat him up, you know?
On the 27th or whatever day it was (I really don't remember; it's all sort of a blur now.) we drove through the snowy Illinois roads and played cows, but there really weren't that many cows. You know, cows is a game that is really great when everyone in the country has cows (like in Wisconsin, not so much Illinois). We stopped at Wendy's for lunch and continued on to Uncle Joe's for Christmas with my mom's family. Grandma Judy ate her legendary Jell-O salad. It has watermelon Jell-O, green olives, and celery, all mixed together with like the olives suspended in the Jell-O and stuff. Yeah, I'll let you decide if you want to try it, but she loves it.
We stayed the night at Uncle Joe's and hung out there and the next day had the Hooperdoodle (I have decided that I'm using Hooperdoodle as my last name on the Internet instead of my actual last name) Christmas at grandma Linny's house with my dad's family and such. It was very fun. I was appointed the new Santa's Helper by Aunt Kim, who has been the Santa's Helper forever and so now I'm the new Santa's Helper. All the little kids helped me. Jake told me I run a tight shop. (I'm sure he and all my older cousins were jealous that they weren't appointed new Santa's Helper.)
The Christmas Eve snow was a couple of days late. It snowed in St. Louis the night we drove home from Illinois. It had a sort of, um, magical effect as we drove through our adorable neighborhood and watched the (still up) Christmas lights reflected on white though the windows.
It was a good break.
I can't decide if I'm excited to go back to school tomorrow or not. I really have enjoyed sleeping so much but I think it will be nice to get back to structured routines and seeing my friends and teachers at school. Alas, it's no Hogwarts.
