christmas with the fam

I don't know about you, but I spend Christmas with my family and it always yields a few good stories. Here are the highlights from Christmas 2010 in Ottawa.

• Watching my mom balance her chequebook. She keeps all of her receipts, uses the ledger at the end to add and subtract, and then compares it against the printed statement that arrives in the mail. To the dollar she does this. Just to make sure she knows what she has spent and to ensure that the bank is not cheating her of anything. I happen to be know her bank manager and am seriously tempted to tell him that she doesn't trust his system. And then, when I wanted to return a sweater she gave me for Christmas (because it happens to be pretty much the exact same sweater she gave me last year ... from the same store) the receipt is nowhere to be found. Great system mom.
• On my first night home, we had a lovely meal. Sadly, we sat down for dinner at 7:30, which happens to be when Jeopardy starts. Now I love Jeopardy as much as the next person, but my parents feel the need to scream the answers at the tv. And they know a lot of the answers (or questions I guess?). Between the two of them, they could be the next Ken Jennings. While annoying, it also explains a lot about where I got my nerdiness/ability to remember random pieces of useless trivia.
• On Monday night we went to a cocktail party being hosted by family friends. It was quite lovely. Lots of good food, good champagne, and good conversation. Then the party went sideways. The young people, which for some reason included me, decided to go out on the town. Now I didn't expect this party to turn into a big night out, so I didn't even bring my purse with me. So I had to hit up my dad for 60 bucks to go out drinking. Yep. I'm 34, and I'm just that much of a skid. The party continued at the bar. When I decided to leave at about 2 am, one of the guys said to me "you can't leave ... it's the last day of summer, we can't stop drinking yet." Two problems with that sentence. A, it's December 27th, not labour day and 2, the bar has stopped serving alcohol, so we have to stop drinking. Anyhow, I made it home. Barely.
• An interesting post script to this story is the fact that somehow my mom made it home with only one shoe. It only really makes sense in the context of a Canadian winter, whereby you wear boots and bring shoes to wear inside at the party. She figured out it was lost when they drove another couple home and the shoe fell out of the car when she got out of the back seat. When she emailed said couple to enquire about her lost shoe, the couple was very confused because they were so drunk, they thought that they had gone home with another couple. Or a cab. They had no recollection of my parents driving them home. At any rate, the shoe was found 2 days later on the driveway. All that to say, it was a good party.
• The next day I had a full Bridget Jones/sad single moment when I went to a baby shower hung over. I'm pretty sure I still smelled of booze and stale cigarettes.

There were plenty of other memorable moments, but really these are the ones that stand out through the haze of champagne - which I had every night. Of course we had turkey, christmas pudding, and lots of leftovers. I somehow managed to get about 10 hours of sleep every night ... might be related to all that turkey. All in all, a great Christmas. On to NYE!