The celebration continues

We spent Christmas Eve at Elijah's and Noah's house after they returned from a candlelight church service. We dined on scrumptious stuff their mother had spread out, honey-glazed ham and turkey and even "beans and greens" (a Southern dish) along with Tiramasu cheesecake and the like. At eleven p.m. we drove the twelve miles home and fell into bed. On Christmas morning we returned for breakfast, which was just as amazing as the previous evening's repast. You haven't lived until you have eaten French toast that has been stuffed with a cream cheese and orange marmalade concoction and then covered with powdered sugar and Maple syrup. We oohed and ahhed at the new iPod, the new cell phone, the new laptop, the several new electronic games -- all in all, a very electronic Christmas. In early afternoon we returned to our own home and decorated our Christmas tree. Yes, you read that correctly.

On the day after Christmas, Sawyer and Sam and their parents left their home in Alabama in the afternoon and headed in our direction. About two-thirds of the way to our house we met them at a restaurant near where Matthew and Ansley live, and we were joined by them and their parents. The pre-planning committee had suggested O'Charley's, but somehow we ended up at Chili's instead. Here we had the traditional Christmas fajitas quesadillas and the cedar-planked tilapia with pico de gallo. I'm kidding about the "traditional," but that's what we had. Then we caravaned (caravanned?) with Sawyer and Sam and their parents the rest of the way to our house.

Two days after Christmas (that would be today), Elijah and Noah and Matthew and Ansley and their assorted parents are all joining the rest of us at our house, where we will finally get to have our "full family" exchange of Christmas gifts together. Oh, yes, and we'll eat even more goodies.

Such is the life of one set of happy grandparents. Christmas is certainly about more than food and family, but, hey, we're not complaining.

Alert the media: The "Bah, humbug" phase has ended.

Little signs that I'm finally getting into the Christmas spirit:

-- Gift-buying for the grandchildren is finished, as well as for the male adults in the family. Gift-buying for the female adults has not yet occurred, however. The good news: There are still twelve shopping days until Christmas. The bad news: All those gifts have to be wrapped.

-- Putting up a Christmas tree is beginning to seem more like a sweet inevitability and less like a repugnant chore.

-- Sitting down and signing Christmas cards and addressing all those envelopes and sticking on all those stamps sounds almost enjoyable.

-- Scot McKnight posted all eight verses of "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" on his blog and I didn't have one cynical thought.

-- I've hummed through "Thou Didst Leave Thy Throne And Thy Kingly Crown" several times.

As each speaker says at the end of each lesson in the Nine Lessons and Carols, "Thanks be to God." Now if we could just get the all-Christmas-all-the-time radio station to stop playing that barking dogs version of "Jingle Bells"....

Holidays and prepositions

Thanksgiving is day after tomorrow, and Christmas is five weeks from today. Part of me says, "Yes! Woo-hoo! My favorite time of year!" and another part of me says, "I'll be glad when it's over." I do enjoy getting together with our offspring and their families, I enjoy the food, I enjoy the carols (real ones, about the birth of Christ). But I don't enjoy all the accompanying hustle-bustle and commercialization and the rush in some quarters to be first, biggest, or best. For example, we saw our first Christmas-decorated house this year shortly after Halloween. That's one set of Joneses we will not be keeping up with. Make that one set of Joneses with whom we will not be keeping up. No, make that one set of Joneses up with whom we will not be keeping.

Since Dave Barry stopped writing columns, where is Mr. Language Person when you need him? Someone once took Winston Churchill to task for ending a sentence with a preposition, and he replied, "That is the sort of criticism up with which I will not put." Someone else said that anybody who thinks a preposition is a word you're not supposed to end a sentence with doesn't know what prepositions are for or what language is all about [emphasis mine]. Which reminds me of an old joke: A salesman knocks on a door and a little boy opens it. The salesman says, "Son, may I speak to your mother?" and the little boy replies, "She ain't at home." Shocked, the salesman says, "Son, where's your grammar?" and the little boy replies, "She's upstairs takin' a bath."

Getting back to the subject of the holiday season, I'm no Scrooge. But in recent years I have discerned that I go through a "Bah, humbug" phase before really getting into the spirit of the season. So I guess it has started--the "Bah, humbug" part, I mean.