And to All a Good Night

The festivities have ended and all have gone to bed, Jeri at Tom & Laurel's house. I very much want to be sleeping, so I offer no promise that this is going to be particularly interesting.

This morning Joe and Alice brought out the bottle of cinnamon which had been hiding in the bathroom, to prove that they really had cinnamon.

While breakfast was cooking, Jeri had us all make a video on her cell phone to send to Phil, in Boston.

After breakfast, everybody went off to Mass, leaving me alone in the house to shower, do some laundry, have a nice Christmas chat with my mother, and read my book (which I just finished before starting this journal entry). Very nice.

After they returned, Joe started to get dinner ready.

Jeri helped decorate "the shell tree," which was given to the Sykes family when they lived in Hawaii in the 1950s and which has been decorated every year since. They were going to take it to show to Grandma Sykes (didn't want to leave it at the hospital, fearing the ornaments would mysteriously disappear).

And then we all (except Joe, today's chef) went downtown to see Grandma, who seemed pretty tired, but we did manage to get a nice family picture for her soon-to-be-printed Christmas letter.

Tom, Laurel and Bri arrived around 6 or 7 and Joe served a delicious dinner.

Then there were gifts and music and lots of laughter. And, oh yes, there might have been a couple of pictures of Brianna taken during the course of the evening as well.

Aunt Jeri got to teach her how to play the saxophone...

...and how to put blocks in a shape box.

Later, they played a duet together...

while Norm and Walt argued about their memories of how to play the ukelele.

Eventually, Tom et al (including Jeri) left and the rest of us sat around watching the DVD that Ned had made of his videos, which he gave to me at my mother's.

Then Walt, wearing new pj bottoms (which Jeri had called Tom and asked him to buy for her when she realized Walt had been wearing his current pjs for about 15 years!) came to tell me good night.

Now that I've finished this totally uncreative entry, I'm going to drag myself to sleep too.

It really was a lovely Christmas.