Christmas Eve starts off with a festive dinner, as you can see below. The paper crowns are a relatively new addition to the festivities, and you can see that Dad really gets into it. We then eat a piece of meat and twenty five cakes and pies, and call it a night. Christmas day consists of watching the nephews and Pomme open an endless supply of presents. My invisible sister, the procreating one, once asked me if I were nervous showing all this personal stuff on the internet, obviously misunderstanding the incredibly tiny size of my audience. But I know she's nonetheless not big on this sort of thing, so we'll gloss over her photo and instead focus on Mom, who's more into the celebrity that comes from a starring role in this blog. Here, in a scene straight out of A Christmas Story, Mom plays the part of Ralphie and tries to shoot her eye out.

104. Monroe, CT

Ah, home sweet home! This is an odd part of the blog, since nobody will ever visit my hometown of Monroe as a tourist, so any casual visitor to the blog will be bored silly, and of course family members are intimately familiar with the place and will certainly learn nothing new here. But since I'm wed to chronology (No, Somchai I'm not calling you a name) we'll plow quickly through Monroe. During the day I showed Somchai some of the town's landmarks, and in the evening we hung around the house, mostly eating, watching movies and playing the family's favorite card game, Crick Crack (not sure if the words have K's at the end or not, so family feel free to correct me.) Mom is at her most frantic during the days leading to Christmas, as she decorates every square inch of the house in festive Christmasness, plus buys about four hundred presents for each of her grandchildren, plus another thousand for Pomme, forgetting that she's no longer a little girl that still believes in Santa. Stoli and I get some socks and the satisfaction of watching everyone else open thousands of gifts.