the education of henry

Christmas!

2023-12-25

This week the blog covers an extra day, since Christmas was on Monday. We took part of the week off from school and Mom made dough for cookies. Not as many as she used to make, of course.

The chocolate crinkle dough.

We still did Recess - Jonathan and I were playing with ice.

Mom was workng on baking cookies all day on Friday, but she was too tired to do any decorating. She got up at 5:00 AM on Saturday to get the icing on the almond sugar cookies.

Dad was helping, too.

Mostly he filled in colors - he hasn't had as much practice as Mom.

Then Dad tried to give me blue milk for breakfast. I refused.

Dad had to drink it.

After breakfast, we drove to deliver cookies to my grandparents and to Kara, who met us at GG's house. We didn't stay long - just dropping off cookies and picking up presents. Then we went home. We had lunch, and after much begging, Mom and Dad agreed to let me open some presents early. So I opened the presents from Diane, David, and Bill.

We gave some cookies to Jonathan and his family, and they sent us a few pictures.

Jonathan enjoying the icing right out of the bag.

Some of the icing made it on to the cookies as well.

And then we'll jump to Christmas Eve. Mom and Dad let me open my presents in the morning, mostly because they didn't want to listen to me beg to open them all day or constantly ask when I was going to get to open presents. We all wore our Christmas jammies for the event.

Really excited about the Viking Village.

WARNING! The video below has some explicit language, so don't watch if you have sensitive ears.

And excited about the second one, too.

Meanwhile, Jonathan had to take some security measures to stop his dad from eating all the almond sugar cookies.

Chained up.

And then it was night, and time to open presents over Zoom with Kara, Josh, Freya, Gail, Kevin, Les, and Muriel. I just have pictures of my presents, since it was kind of hard to take pictures of the screen. We are still in our Christmas jammies.

Dad managed to capture a part of one of my celebrations after opening a present - this was for the Clone Wars video game I have been wanting since 2019.

A gift card to my second favorite store (after the LEGO store, of course).

The Ghost!

Mom got some flowers.

And some more flowers.

I should also mention the Christmas jammies are new, too - the old ones were too big, so Auntie Kara got Mom some new ones.

That is the end of presents for Christmas Eve. Dad did get some presents as well, but he was the camera operator, so I'll just tell you he got some books he's been wanting to read: Sun House by David James Duncan and The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu.

But it is not the end of presents, because we had more for Christmas morning from Santa. And yes, we are still in our Christmas jammies.

More rebel troopers.

I've really been wanting this one!

A big book of weapons.

I don't remember what this look was for, but it's worth preserving.

More celebrating.

Here's the pile. I realize a couple things didn't get captured in all the excitement over the three days: a big box of stroopwafels, some candy, the book by Michael Livingston, and maybe some others?

Oh yeah, one last surprise: a second Lion Knights' Castle! It was on sale at LEGO, and Dad used all our points (and a gift card from GG and Kevin) to get the price down so low it was almost like stealing it.

And that was it for my presents. I promise.

But here is one of Jonathan's - I am so jealous. He's wearing the t-shirt we got him at the Air and Space Museum.

Here's an obligatory Christmas food picture. A plate of some of my favorite foods:

And that will do it for our Christmas post. Thanks so much to everyone for all the wonderful gifts and for all the fun I had opening them! In the next few weeks I am sure there will be some pictures of the LEGO sets as I work my way through building them all.

I hope everyone had a safe and Happy Christmas!

Take care!