On the First Day of Christmakkah...

When I first woke up this morning there was a thick layer of white out the window, so I sang White Christmas to Garrett. Of course, being Southern California, it was a super thick fog rather than snow. We all fell back asleep for a little while. Once we got up, we brought Garrett downstairs to see that Santa had filled his stocking with Monkey themed gifts: a stuffed monkey, a "5 Little Monkeys" book, and another book about monkeys "Hand, Hand, Finger, Thumb

After some breakfast, we got ready for the day, and dressed Garrett in his "Baby's First Christmas" outfit. We were the first guests to arrive at Mom and Aunt Betsy's house, so we chatted and unloaded our presents under their tree. My Uncle Andy and his girlfriend, Carole, arrived next, followed by Aunt Bev, Rachel and Betsy. Bill is sick this Christmas, so he stayed home with my uncle, Shawn. Once everyone got settled we started exchanging gifts. With my family, the process is quite different than with the Cordovas. There is only one gift opened at a time and the gifts tend to be wrapped individually. The advantage to this system is that you can see what each person is giving to the other person; however, the gift exchanged takes significantly longer (cumulatively we spent about six hours exchanging gifts, and had a fun time doing so).

As Andrea and I expected, people were especially generous with gifts for Garrett, since it was his first Christmas. He received lots of clothes and toys, with an emphasis from one branch of the family tree on basketball themed gifts ;-)

We enjoyed a delicious prime rib dinner with baked potatoes, a corn casserole, salad and rolls. During dinner, we received a phone call from my cousin Helen, who was celebrating Christmas in Nashville, Tennessee. She sent her congratulations to Andrea and I on Garrett's birth and a Merry Christmas wish for all. Dessert included an amaretto cake that was a gift to Mom and Betsy from Andrea's parents with homemade Devonshire cream to accompany it. There were also cookies, peppermint bark and fudge on the table!

Being the first day of Hannukah, we also opened Garrett's first Hannukah present. After describing the festival of lights to Garrett, someone said "we should get this on video". As soon as we pulled out the video camera Garrett grinned from ear to ear! It was one of the biggest smiles in a day filled with big smiles (in a week that has been categorized by his increasing smiles!). After describing the festival again for posterity we unwrapped his "Little Piggies" hand puppet & book combo and we read him the story right away.

After the presents were opened and the other guests were heading home, Garrett fell asleep on Andrea's chest while I quickly tried to fix a problem with the component video on Mom and Betsy's new home theater set-up. Apparently my diagnosis of a bad dvd player was incorrect, so we reconnected the cables as they had been and then I packed up the car. Garrett slept the whole ride back to Coto de Caza and stayed asleep while the parents got ready for bed. However, he woke up as we transferred him into his cradle, too hungry to sleep by himself, so Andrea fed him before we all
fell asleep for the night. Merry Christmas (and Happy Hannukah) to all, and to all a good night.