Part II: Christmas

I woke up bright and early on Christmas day to the sound of my sister calling at 7 a.m. from California. My family in San Diego, consisting of my sister, her two children and my parents, were getting ready to open presents, and I was late getting my computer turned on, and my webcam up and running. After a few technical difficulties with Skype (I'd never used it before), I got to see my adorable niece and nephew open up their Christmas presents from me and then David and I got to open our other gifts. My sister bought me a set of springform pans so that I can start baking cheesecake (yay!) and a beautiful new ornament for my tree. My grandmother got us The Dark Knight and my mother sent me some more Food Saver canisters, Legos for David and money. My mom also got me a gorgeous nativity set hand crafted by Jim Shore.



Have I mentioned I love Christmas decorations? And I love this Nativity set with its beautiful colors, quilt-like art style, and hand painting. My mom only bought me the stable, Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus.


The holy family.


Joseph's face.


The virgin Mary.


This is the detail on Joseph skirt and the baby Jesus. Isn't it just gorgeous?

I'd like to buy the shepherd, farm animals and the three wiseman who go with this set as well. Maybe I can use the money my mom sent me to buy some of them, after I've bought myself all the books I want. And there are a lot of those...

David bought me a new food processor (it looks awesome!) but he went a little overboard with the stocking. He stuffed it full of gum, chapstick, the new J.K. Rowling book, candy, and kitchen gadgets. I could barely get them all out.

This year for Christmas, I decided to make things a little harder for David. I bought him a beautiful deep purple tie and inside of it, I hid the first of five scavenger hunt clues. He had to follow the clues to find his gift -- a Lego x-wing fighter from Star Wars. See, the thing about Legos is that they are not easy to disguise because of all the noise they make in their boxes, so I wanted to hide it away from David so he couldn't guess what it was before Christmas Day. (I'm notorious for doing this. I was really wrong this year about what David bought me.)


Here David is trying to figure out the fourth clue. He had a hard time with this one.


He finds his gift in the closet! (Where it's been hidden since Halloween. Yes, I bought his present that long ago.)


David opening up his new Lego set.



And here's David building his X-Wing fighter.



While David built his plane [edited to say that David has informed me that the x-wing fighter is NOT a plane, so don't listen to me], I watched Mulan, which was a gift from one of David's sisters.

At 11 a.m., David and I got all dressed and ready, and headed to the house of one of David's co-workers for a big brunch Christmas party. We ate lots of delicious Belgian waffles, quiche, and fruit and then settled down for some board games. I love board games. I basically love all games though.

Eventually, however, the board games were disrupted when the hostess wanted to break out Rockband and insisted that David be the singer. David has a very good voice and does very well when rocking out to Rock Band (or World Tour). I think if he had voice lessons, David could be a very good singer even without Rock Band helping him along.


Here's David singing at Rockband, while all the other guests watch and cheer on the band.


Some more singing and rocking.

I played a few songs (on guitar). I like to sing, but only songs that I know really well, and I haven't had enough practice on the drums to feel comfortable playing them. I need to work on that, but I have bad rhythm. I'll get it one day.

We stayed until 3:30 p.m., finally tearing ourselves away from Rock Band, in order to go to our next scheduled engagement, a big Christmas dinner with another of David's Navy friends (who, incidentally, also served his mission in Taiwan at the same time as David). Adam and his wife Kiona, have two girls and a six-week old baby boy, who I got to play with while Kiona made a very delicious and entirely homemade meal with a turkey/pork beast, ciabatta bread stuffing, purple sweet potatoes (only to be found in Hawaii), real mashed potatoes, and pies. Though the dinner was a little bit late, it was very delicious. I was quite stuffed by the end. And then Adam made his own special kind of hot chocolate that was rich and delicious but nearly killed me in its decadence. David and I were barely able to roll ourselves back to our car and stumble into our home around 9 p.m.

So Christmas Day was very enjoyable all around, filled with family and friends and lots of good food. We got ourselves packed and ready, and went to bed early to wake up at 4 a.m. the next morning to face the Haiku Stairs, also known as Stairway to Heaven, an illegal and treacherous hike up a mountain. Stay tuned for Part III: Stairway to Heaven. You won't be disappointed.