mail call, and food

[cellio]

Today's mail brought a lovely card from browngirl (the "happy everything" card), along with a completely-unexpected card from lyev. Thanks, guys! (In case you hadn't figured it out, I use "guys" in the gender-neutral sense. :-) )

Today's mail did not yet bring a couple of DVDs I ordered nearly two weeks ago. Sigh. Fortunately, we are getting together with my family the weekend after Christmas, not the weekend before, so there's plenty of time yet.


The choir dinner was tonight. Wonderful food and pleasant company, and I left with fewer cookies than I arrived with. I brought home some assorted dairy cookies that I couldn't eat tonight with the meat; I'll ration them over the next few days. :-)

Fran roasted a turkey. They were away for Thanksgiving, and apparently she missed doing it. The turkey was good; the stuffing was wonderful. I'll have to get her recipe at some point. It included apples, raisins, and chestnuts; I've never cooked with chestnuts before (or knowingly eaten them, actually).

It's enough that Fran and Alan let us invade their house every week when neither of them is even in the choir. And then they feed us in grand fashion once a year. I guess we don't sound too bad. :-)

Comments

[cellio]

Last year was my first December at a new job, and a minor negotiating point during the interview (it turned out to be minor to them) was that I could move holidays around -- work Dec 25 and take off Yom Kippur instead, and that kind of thing. That means that for the first time I'm not burning vacation days for holidays all the time. (And as a bonus, it's easy to be productive when there's no one else around to interrupt. :-) )

So I explained to my parents that my employer was letting me do this, and "as you can see all the fall holidays landed on weekdays this year" (not true this year, but it was true last year), and asked if they'd mind terribly if we got together the Sunday before instead of on Christmas. This was ok with them. Having done it once, it was pretty easy to repeat this year; while most of the fall holidays were on weekends, we still had Yom Kippur, Shavuot, and of course Pesach to account for.

So I guess I'm using my job as an excuse, but not in the traditional way. But I figure that once we've broken the Christmas-day pattern for a few years, it'll be easy to keep doing in the future.

I hope you're able to work out something with your family. I've been taking small steps with mine, and it takes time but it seems to be working.