Now that Santa, that lazy slacker, has finally delivered all his gifts I can tell you what he was up to this past week.
First of all, only moments ago Santa's elf who works for UPS in England finally delivered our Christmas package to Morley's family--four days late. Ho, Ho, Ho, my butt. And thus later today I'll be having a chat with Santa's elves in UPS's billing department about getting a refund on those whopper fees we paid to get the stuff there by Christmas Eve.
As for Heather's visit from Santa, her gift wasn't easy to wrap so she had almost nothing under our tree before Christmas. She found her gift yesterday when she returned home from Kentucky--while she was out of town that sneaky Santa broke into her place and whipped out a mini Extreme Makeover on the bedroom in her new apartment. I wish I had made some Before and After photos to show you how great it turned out but Elf Morley and Elf Susan were so wigged out and pooped after toting all that booty up and down the stairs at Heather's place that they were too exhausted to push the button on the camera. (Not really. Elf Morley and Elf Susan just forgot to take their dang camera with them.)
As for the rest of the kids, we stopped giving them individual gifts a few years back when we realized we are clueless old codgers with no earthly idea of what teenage boys like or what the girls or my son-in-law really want. So now we give them something we enjoy together: a family adventure. We call it our "Family Christmas in July" and all of us look forward to it all year long.
This year Santa delivered a DVD to them with instructions to play it on Christmas Day:
Or go here to watch a larger version on YouTube--and please, for Heaven's sake click the "watch in high quality" link below the screen so you can see a better, clearer format than the over compressed, blurry "normal" format.
And so that is (finally!) the official end of our Christmas season. Whew! That was intense.
And now our Birthday Season begins, and in this family Birthday Season is almost as intense as Christmas. We have a LOT of birthdays packed into the next ten days.
On that note, Happy Birthday Michelle and Carol!
Since this has been an intense year with precious little time to chill out and relax, what I really wanted to do for Christmas was as little as possible. And that's what we've done.
On Christmas Eve we attended the first half of a candlelight service at a Baptist church near the house. It's a long story about that half-sermon, but let's just say it was the most 
On Christmas morning we exchanged gifts and hung around the house reveling in the rare sensation of not having anywhere to go and nothing to do, then we packed up Shelby and headed here to the boat.
In the early afternoon two couples joined us for a long, leisurly Christmas cruise around the lake. It was perfect: we had the water to ourselves, the weather was warm (nearly 70 degrees), the sky was sunny and blue, the seagulls were playful, and the boat was decked out in Christmas lights and garlands. We had Christmas carols playing on the radio but the best music of all was the sound of our cell phones ringing with calls from the kids in Kentucky and our families in Tennessee and England.
And that's what we've done with our Christmas holiday so far. 
