James ended up staying home today; he'd been getting more and more tired and sore throated all week. It's not the flu, just the creeping crud that was going around and finally got to him. I went out for a little while this morning: spent a couple of Linens'n'Things coupons on some kitchen gadgets we needed, then spent much too much at the "Giant Book Sale," mostly on "For Better or For Worse," "Baby Blues," "Fox Trot," "Mutts," and "Rose is Rose" compilations, plus the newest Jill Paton Walsh Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane homage.
Thank God for the billboard on the way home, or I might have forgotten to stop at Harry's for the bread for our usual Christmas Eve feast.
Since James was home, we first played one of our favorites, John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together and then we settled in to watch the DVD of the extended version of The Two Towers, since we want to see Return of the King some time this weekend. It's not exactly Christmasy :-) but it was a nice thing to be able to do together.
(Before we watched Two Towers, I had James hook up the subwoofer. The new receiver has six speakers, right, left, center, surround left, surround right, and the subwoofer. Since we're going to be shifting the TV and the furniture around, I thought it silly to hitch up all the speakers now. But for Towers we really needed the subwoofer. Oh, boy, does it "woof." The funniest thing was watching Willow. The first time something rumbled onscreen she stepped up to the subwoofer, sniffing suspiciously, then she glanced at the center speaker, then back at the subwoofer, then something really growled and she ran backwards, barking at the top of her lungs! She did it twice before she got used to the subsonics. It really did make the floor rumble!)
Oh, during the Muppets someone knocked on the door; it turned out to be Steve, the guy who cuts our lawn. He brought us an amaryllis plant. I'm usually death to plants and we really have no sunny spot for it, but we're going to try it in the living room and see what happens.
I was half watching Towers and half reading one of my favorite books to read at Christmas, Kate Seredy's The Open Gate. It's not really a Christmas story, but a Christmas event figures in it and it ends the Christmas after the Pearl Harbor attack. Every time I read this book I have the uncontrollable urge to go out to live on a farm despite one of the lead character's admonition of the harshness--alongside the rewards--of farm life.
It's a joyous book, about the Preston family (parents, daughter and son, and the father's mother), who in June 1941 head out to a New York lake resort after Dad loses his job. Through a series of accidents and a little bit of machination by the grandmother, the Prestons end up buying a beautiful but run-down old farm in Orange County. Gran, homesick for the farm life she had when her sons were young, is determined to keep the farm--and she convinces the rest of the family as well. Soon they befriend the neighbors, an elderly couple raising their grandson after his parents were killed on Christmas Eve years earlier, and a Slovakian couple whose roots are truly in the soil.
Of course the inevitable happens on December 7, but the family, like the entire country, proceeds with resolve, and a special Christmas gift makes the first wartime holiday a special one for the Prestons and their new friends.
This all accompanied by Kate Seredy's delightful illustrations!
For dinner we had the usual spaghetti, thick with pepperoni, pork, and meatballs, and then "had Christmas" in the living room with the fire going. James received a plethora of books and a paper airplane calendar; I discovered, besides a copy of The Goodbye Girl and the much coveted Amelia Peabody's Egypt, that I had some pretty baubles, a carnivorous rabbit and a sheep in wolf's clothing (yes, you read that right). I'd seen the latter at DragonCon and laughed over it; James found it in an online catalog.
This should have been it, but we also baked a chocolate-chip chocolate cake to take with us for dessert tomorrow. (As of writing this, we haven't decanted it yet. Wish us luck...)
James is planning to go to work tomorrow, so to that end we are not attending Midnight Mass this year. This has made Bandit extremely happy--this means he can cling to my neck and chirble longer.
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