Sammamish holidays

Well! We made it! It's been a very wet and snowy Christmas - everywhere, I guess, but here it's truly unusual. Thank goodness we already live here, because had we tried to travel cross-country to get here, this surely would have been the year we got stuck. As it was, we drove 30 minutes to and from Kari and Danny's house without incident. They got at least 12 inches of snow in the past week and a half. Seattle got somewhat less, and now it's finally turning to rain; only the side streets and parking lots are slushy. We're all hoping for a slow melt, to minimize the flooding. We have water dripping steadily into our apartment through the unfinished ceiling, from the snow melting on the walkway above... in the scheme of things, not the worst, but still.

Kari loves Christmas and it's always very festive over there, with Christmas eve activities including a family feast, writing letters to Santa, and setting out cookies for him and oatmeal and apples for the reindeer. After the kids go to bed there is a flurry of last-minute wrapping, creating artsy gifts (this year was crowns), and setting up the stockings, which go into these gigantic boxes that the kids play in for the rest of the year. I didn't grow up with a full-fledged kid-oriented Christmas, and I am not really up to speed on all the specifics... the details of the Santa mythology, which kinds of gifts are opened when, I get a little overwhelmed. But we swing with it.

Here are the kids discovering their gigantic boxes.



The opening of the presents is your basic mayhem. One of the traditions is to use the leftover ribbons to decorate the dog.



The resulting toys are of course how the kids spend the rest of the day (that, and gorging on cookies). Here's Jordan with a Lego forklift of Sam's. That's Harry in the background with the crown.



At that point he had been in those pajamas for about five days running -- all those snow days, he just never really got dressed. I did finally got them into the laundry today. That meant peeling off the firefighter badge from the front of them, but he said he was ready to let that go.

Jordan's special gift was this lovely knight, shown here attacking the decorated dog.



All the glamour of the morning, though, was in these swords. They're soft, but glittery and bejeweled, and they look a lot like light sabers, and ... there were only two of them, one for Harry and one for Sam. Ah, Christmas. Sam lent his to Jordan for much of the day.



It brought up a lot of Christmas issues for me, because the swords were from Santa, and Jordan asked very quietly and sadly why Santa didn't bring one for him. I was totally out of my depth... what could I say that would continue to respect the household Christmas traditions? But we managed it somehow. And now that we are out of those swords' seductive glow, it doesn't seem to be a problem. Jordan told me later how he had reconciled himself to the situation. He said he thought of something they say at his school, "like when Will was sharing his Star Wars toys? We said, 'You get what you get and you don't have a fit.' This was like that." I've heard that phrase before and I'm not crazy about it - it seems a little rude. But it worked for Jordan. Maybe it helped him recognize that his trouble with the swords was not unique - that there a lot of situations in which you don't get everything you want, and life goes on.

Hanukkah gets its due at Kari and Danny's house as well. Every night there were five menorahs lit before dinner.



And after dinner, the most high-energy games of dreidel I've ever experienced. Here are the kids chanting "Nun! Nun! Nun!" in an effort to prevent whoever it was from winning.



And last but not least, the highlight of Aaron's holiday was Lenny, the gecko. You probably can't see Lenny in this picture but hopefully you can sense Aaron's fascination. He could not get enough.