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So this is Christmas...
I have been back at work for 5 hours or so. I don't really know. It feels like FOREVER! I spent the holidays battling a potential cold. I had all the telltale signs, what with the runny nose and sinus pressure, the hacking cough and the super sleepiness. Thanks to pharmaceuticals, I was able to keep it from getting super nasty, but I'm still waaaay tired.
Christmas just wasn't Christmas for me this year. I spent the whole holiday learning Ryan's family traditions which are quite lovely, just not mine. All but one present were opened by the time my head hit the unfamiliar pillow at the farm house on Christmas Eve. For the past 27 years, virtually no gifts have been opened prior to 7:30 am CST on Christmas day. The traditional Christmas Eve dinner of whatever the poorest, most tired college student desires was replaced by an actual traditional meal of oyster stew and sandwiches. Christmas Eve mass was held at a Christian church, but not a Catholic church. We recited a lot of verses and prose about light and candles, but didn't hear as much about Mary and Joseph and the little manger where baby Jesus was wrapped in swaddling clothes. Rather than cringing through a really horrible version of Joy to the World complete with organ synthesized trumpet, this year's mass ended with a mumbled melody of everyone trying to remember the second verse to Silent Night while holding a candle in a tiny church on the prairie. There was no crock pot filled with "puke dip" (melted Velveeta and seasoned ground beef), no slightly burnt Chex mix, no pumpkin pie, no 1lb bag of Twizzlers and no plate full of homemade goodies delivered by the Bradley's. Instead there were fancy cheeses that smelled like dirty feet, pumpkin rolls, cream cheese rollups and homemade pickles.
I keep/kept reminding myself that these are my new traditions, or at least part of them. And they are lovely, and I am so lucky to have been invited to participate. That didn't make it any easier when I was asked what my family was doing on Christmas morning, and if Holly and Elliot would be done ripping through the mounds of presents that awaited them under the tree that I was used to waking up to.
Participation in these new traditions required a whole heck of a lot of driving. We left Kansas City on Thursday after spending an hour trying to get Eli to come back inside my house. It was about 8 degrees outside or something insane like that, so he had taken refuge under the back deck and refused to come inside. Darn cat. We reached Salina 3 hours later, and had dinner with my parents and Ryan's parents.
Friday morning brought another 2 hours in the car as we traveled from Salina to Gaylord, Kansas for Ryan's father's family Christmas. Anyone who has been or lived in a small town may remember that you always know where you are by the name of the city on the water tower. Gaylord is such a small community that the name of the town literally wraps around their tiny little water tower:
The drive to and from Gaylord was partially along a "scenic route."
These are a few shots taken along said "scenic route."
It looked like this for the first 45 minutes of the "scenic route."
Then we past Wilson Lake, where it looks like the above and below pictures everywhere except for where there is water. FYI - if you are ever in Wilson, KS, stop by the grocery store there and pick up some dried beef from their deli. It is to die for.
Saturday morning greeted us with even more driving. First a 2 hour jaunt to Salina to pick up our car and a few necessities, then another 1.5 hours to drive to Wichita for Ryan's mom's family Christmas. I stopped taking pictures at that point, but you can just reference the pictures from above if you are curious what that part of Kansas looks like. After another round of gift opening and a gigantic meal, we grabbed a few hours of sleep before waking up Sunday to drive another 3 hours to make it home to Kansas City.
So that was Christmas. It just wasn't the same.
1:52 p.m. - December 27, 2004
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