It�s been so long. Where do I begin? I will be catching up in parts, as my time is short.

Christmas Eve.

The party was a lot of fun and went off without a hitch, save the occasional party-induced blowing of a fuse (For some reason, although we have about 9,000 fuses, about half the house is on one of them. The others seem to control single appliances or outlets. It�s completely mystifying. But even that one fuse wouldn�t be a problem, except that when someone installed a new sump pump a few years before we moved in, they chose to hook it up to that particular fuse. Because of the way our septic system is constructed, the sump pump doesn�t just pump out basement floods. It pumps out all waste water from the house to the septic field. So whenever we have a party and there is a higher than average amount of toilet flushing and hand-washing, the power goes out. Nice, huh?). We spent the day cleaning and rearranging setting out the luminaria that are required of everyone in our neighborhood. Shortly before everyone was to arrive, we went outside to light the luminaria and clip some holly and evergreen for the table centerpieces. AJ and I scattered the �reindeer food� he brought home from preschool (an apparent mix of oats, bird seed and that quintessential preschool ingredient, glitter) on the ground around the chimney to help lead Santa to our house. We went inside and took off our coats and turned around to find the first guests arriving.
The rest of the evening is something of a blur. AJ was not entirely happy with the whole party thing. He spent most of the evening hiding upstairs in his room with one or more of his cousins playing with his train set. Every now and then he would come down and attempt to quell the exuberant crowd by yelling, �Be quiet! It�s too loud!� Sadly, no one but me could hear him. He would eventually give up and retreat to his lair once more. He was coaxed down with relatively little effort, however, when he heard Santa�s arrival was imminent. He came downstairs and sat by the tree looking very serious. At one point he got up and put on his Santa hat (�I think Santa will like it if I wear his hat�) and went to peer out the window for the sleigh. He was somewhat dismayed to find that our guests had not left a parking place for Santa in our driveway, but he was relieved when he learned that Santa was already upstairs. And soon he emerged, amid much ringing of bells and ho-ho-ho-ing, his padded stomach listing a bit to one side, his beard in danger of falling off at any moment. AJ waited patiently for his gift, which turned out to be a battery-operated engine for his wooden train set that can pull his cars around the tracks (�It�s just what I always wanted!�). He ran around and showed it to everyone. And after he had done that, he showed it again and then retreated back to his room to run it in endless loops around his track.

We are left with an insane number of cookies, which I am hoping to pawn off on the remaining guests, the first of whose arrival is imminent. People stayed later than usual and we didn�t end up, as we had hoped, being able to make it to midnight Mass. Instead, after helping AJ leave cookies and milk for Santa, we put him to bed, cleaned up the worst of the debris, and donned our coats and mittens for took a short walk in the freezing cold night under the full moon. We watched the luminaria flickering off the ice and water in the pond. �Merry Christmas.�

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