Christmas at last!

We postponed Christmas for a day and a half as we waited for ambertatge and her sweetie to work their way through the holiday airline pileup, but they finally arrived at 9:30 pm on Christmas night. Thanks much to minnehaha for providing us with a lovely party to pass the time while we waited.

So we just reset the calendar and had our Christmas morning on Boxing Day, complete with stockings for the "kids" and the usual luxurious sea of gloriously wrapped presents. After the present-opening orgy, Richard made latkes and then we all started working this amazing spherical jigsaw puzzle....and that took care of the next 12-14 hours. That's the finished result over there in my userpic. It took 6 people 14 hours to assemble, proving that although we may not be very good at jigsaw puzzles, we certainly are OCD.

The presents were greatly successful, starting with the aforementioned puzzle. A lot of people in our little family group gave each other music CDs, all of which we listened to while working on The Puzzle. I was particularly delighted with the out-of-print-forever Joy of Cooking recording that thorintatge found somewhere (apparently still available in the UK) and with the Incredible Strings compilation thorintatge got from barondave.

I had been planning to get going on a winter exercise program during the long winter vacation (my company gives us the Christmas-New Year's week off). But what with Christmas being postponed at our house, the week is half over and we're just finishing up the Christmas festivities. I did manage to get outside and skate today at St. Paul's Landmark Center, where they've decided to throw in the towel and admit that we no longer have a real winter in Minnesota; they've installed cooling pipes under the rink to keep it frozen! ambertatge and Olin came along. We stopped for dinner afterwards at Dixie's, a Grand Avenue restaurant specializing in southern cooking, where we were able to get satisfactorily filled up for about $12 a head.