Christmas 2012

December 23, 2012 (photo by Ice). With David and Lynn's wedding, the east coast has a lot of weight for the holidays. Sam T. brought his parents to our neck of the woods for Christmas this year. And Harry and Elle came down with Ian. The festivities started with a lasagna dinner for the New Jersey travelers. The next day we joined most of the (large) Hubbard clan at the Ice show at National Harbor. That's Robert and Sam in the front row.
December 23, 2012. December 23, 2012.
The ice sculptures were nice and very true to the Shrek theme but pretty plastic looking; it would have been nice to see more free-form sculpting. December 23, 2012.
December 23, 2012. I think Robert would agree that the slides were the highlight. There were several and the lines were not long, so it was easy to go a bunch of times. But the 9 degree temperature tended to keep everyone moving through the exhibit.
The next day (the 24th) we celebrated Harry's birthday with a goose dinner and exchanged Christmas presents with the Seattlites and New Jerseyites. We also invited Kelly from FNS and Mattie, a friend of David Z.'s from Columbia to join in the fun. December 24, 2012.
December 24, 2012. December 24, 2012.
December 25, 2012. Christmas day, Robert let us sleep in a little bit as he got up early but went to play one of the new Wii games he got the night before. We may have to give more thought to the idea of opening a present or two on Christmas Eve — that worked out well.
December 25, 2012. December 25, 2012.
This year was a Lego (no surprise there) and Hex Bug Christmas. It's hard to see the Hex Bug Nano on the zip line in the photo above. That worked out better than I expected; the harness really does automatically slip onto the zip line. Robert put his Old Republic Interceptor Lego set together by himself — but with an audience. We thought it might take a while, being lots of pieces; however, just about an hour was all it took. December 25, 2012.
December 27, 2012. We said goodbye to the travelers later that day, and then on the 26th drove down to Atlanta. The next day, Steve, Helen and Aaron came by Loren and Susan's and we had our third Christmas present exchange. Unfortunately, we missed Sam W. as he had to head back to work as we were driving down.
December 27, 2012. December 27, 2012.

Loren and Steve brought David's mom over Christmas afternoon for a visit. The 27th, we went by her Arbor Terrace room to say, "Hi," see how she was doing and deliver this cat calendar for her wall.

We even got a chance to celebrate Susan's sister's birthday while we were in Atlanta. Paula and family drove in from a New Orleans shopping trip in time for a tasty dinner and excellent cake (thank you Sally) and tart (thank you Kate) dessert.

We drove up to Richmond the 30th in time to join Martha for dinner — well, Robert was so tired he slept through dinner. We came back home the next day and had an impromptu visit with Eleanor and her family (they were doing Alexandria First Night). And try as might, we were not able to wake Robert to join in the midnight routine. Maybe next year.

December 27, 2012 (photo by SZap).

Vacation notes: