Christmas Home: Days 1 and 2

So, headed home for Christmas, I left around 9am and within half an hour (of the 3+ hour drive to mid-state Pennsylvania) I had to go to the bathroom. I knew a rest area was coming up, so just waited. However, they were doing truck weighing at that rest area, so it was packed with trucks and I decided it wasn't urgent enough to stop, there was another rest area in about an hour. I drove, drove, drove, got close to the next rest area . . . and it was temporarily CLOSED. Gah! By this point, I was over halfway home. I kept on trucking, but finally caved after getting off the highway onto the backroads and stopped at a gas station. Relieved, the rest of the trip was uneventful.

Arriving home, the main goal was to go get the Christmas tree. We always go to a farm somewhere nearby, walk the field, and cut down our tree. This year, we couldn't go to our usual farm, because the trees they have left are not tall enough. My mom has a cathedral ceiling, so we always get at least a six foot tree, usually something bigger. (The smaller trees go on the side of the room, the larger ones go in the center. The largest we've had is a 10 footer I think.) We needed to get the tree, put it up, and at least get the lights on it. So we went to a new farm, hiked the field, discussed the relevance of shape, bulk, tops, gaps, homes of squirrels, types of tree, straight trunks, and finally went back and picked out the first tree we'd seen that was decent after about 45 minutes of walking. Did I mention it was blustery and cold? But this is a family tradition.

Tree dragging behind us, we paid for the tree (the bastard counted the 1 foot spindly top; we should have nipped that off on the field) and loaded it into the trunk. Getting home, we had to rearrange the living room furniture for the tree placement, including moving the TV to the other side of the room. In the process of plugging the cable back in, I managed to BREAK OFF THE CABLE CONNECTOR in the wall. Obviously, we needed a new plate/connector, so I unscrewed the plate and managed to BREAK THE CABLE CONNECTOR INSIDE THE WALL as well. At this point I didn't want to touch anything. So we left the gaping hole in the wall, ran a cable around the entire room from the second connector we'd been using, and plugged in the cable that way. Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out how to fix the cable, the wall mount, and the connector inside. But I set that aside and started focusing on the tree.

As usual, we had to trim off the bottom branches of the tree to get it into the base. Getting the tree to stand up straight, not wobble, and feel steady required a few hours and lots of cursing. But it was finally up. Another half hour of washing sap off my hands later, I broke out the lights and began testing and untangling them, then putting them on the tree. This went surprisingly well. Lights on the tree, I decided I was done with the tree for the day and turned to . . . food.

Hitting the kitchen, I made spaghetti carbonara for my mom, we ate, and then we made Rice Krispie treats (with chocolate). We ate half the dish that night.

And that was day 1. Day 2 was spent decorating the tree in the morning. We only use hand-made craft ornaments. That didn't take that long. So we gathered up mom's list of things to do in town and we hit the road, shopping, with a special visit to Burger King for lunch. We managed to get pretty much everything mom wanted or needed done in town, including a stop off at Lowe's so I could get the cable stuff needed to repair the cable connection. Then back home, where mom cooked up some venison and dug all of the left-overs out of the frig for dinner. We also began raiding the snack foods brought for Christmas, such as the nuts and chips. We more or less polished off the Rice Krispie treats. *grin* Then it was time to tackle the cable.

I slaved over the connector for a while, plugged everyting in . . . and discovered it didn't work. The TV said "weak or no signal". BAH! So I undid everything I'd just done and began methodically trying to figure out where it all went bad. I discovered it was the inside wall hook-up, the most complicated part in the whole process. I took that apart, played around with it, then hooked the TV back in a played around with it some more. This time I was getting enough of a signal through you could see images through the fuzzy snow but everything was black and white. Back to the wall, and the incredibly short amount of cable they give you to work with. I'd already had to trim it back slightly to get rid of the connector that broke, but I decided I needed to trim it off a little more to give myself a fresh edge to work on. (I'd pretty much mangled the other end into oblivion at this point.) Did that, played some more, and got the cable to come in for most channels rather well. Decided I couldn't do any better than that, and reattached everything to the wall. Cable fixed! (Sort of.)

At this point, I figured I deserved chocolate, so broke into the chocolate-covered peanut butter pretzels. These are horrifying expensive, but utterly delicious. Yum. Pushing myself to leave them behind, I hit the kitchen again and made sugar cookie dough, ate a good chunk of it raw, and then went back to the living room to set up the puzzle table. The last few years, we've made it a tradition to do a family puzzle every Christmas, and this year I'd gotten a 1000 piece one of the interior of a cathedral. (In the last few years, we've done a horse one, medium hard, and a 2000 piece antique map that was so hard we didn't get it finished before I left, so I ended up taking it home. I can't remember what we did before that.)

And then we called it a day. So busy, busy. Today should be more leisurely, with some work on the puzzle (the border is already done), actual baking of the sugar cookies now that the dough has had time to set. We'll also make another batch of Rice Krispie treats, and probably peanut butter blossoms. Maybe some white trash as well. We're trying to go light on the sugar/candy this year. (See how well that's working? *grin*) We've considered a movie, although I'm not sure whether we'll find anything we both want to see. But that's the first two days of Christmas at home this year. We'll see how Christmas Eve and Christmas Day turn out.