Even though it is almost Easter I am thinking about Christmas this evening. That's because I'm going to tell you about some scraps of paper that I have been keeping since December.
I've posted before about our gift-opening traditions. We open presents in rounds, with breaks in between. The sequence of the rounds is determined by contests, and the nature of the contests is always hotly debated. They used to be tame and ordinary, and then somehow they turned weird. During the polar vortex Christmas we had a contest to see who could hold his/her hand in the snow the longest. One year we competed to see who could stay upright the longest in a one-legged jumping contest on the trampoline. Once we raced to see who could loop around our downstairs the fastest while balancing a couch cushion on their head.
I started to say "you get the idea," but it might be weirder than you think.
I proposed a contest in December, and everybody liked the idea. I said, "What if everybody suggests a contest on a slip of paper, and then we each rank the proposed contests? We'll tally the points and open presents in that order." This was the result:

I don't know how readable that will be, and Typepad has not been rendering pictures reliably lately, so I'll describe it for you. Imagine a collection of a dozen Post-it notes, suggesting and ranking a variety of activities. Make anagrams with Scrabble tiles. See who can scream the loudest. My contribution: eat the largest quantity of Sandy's kibble.
It was a joke, you guys. I thought I would read it out loud and everyone would burst out laughing (yes) and then we would be done talking about it (surprisingly, no). One of my children actually ranked it as the best idea of all. "Kibble!" he said, whenever it was time to think of a new contest.
We had the nicest Christmas this year, with all seven of us here and only the seven of us here. I don't know how often we'll have Christmases like that. It's always good to have company and I'm delighted when our kids want to bring their friends and romantic partners home for the holidays. And at the same time I've kept this little pile of Post-it notes since December, thinking nostalgically about our shared traditions and our shared sense of humor.
(Kids, if you're reading this, there are no circumstances in which I will ever eat Sandy's kibble. Nostalgia, yes; kibble, no.)
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