Friday, December 26, 2014

BOOKISH CHRISTMAS

Merry day-after-Christmas, for those of you that celebrate. For those that don't Happy Friday and I hope you get to take some extra time off without any of the Christmas obligations.
Tom and I spend the last couple days running around. Christmas Eve was spent at my mom's, hanging out with her and my brother. Well, also cooking. We stopped in the city to pick up lots of fresh seafood for paella that night. But other than that, mostly hanging out with the family, watching things like A Muppet Christmas Carol (aka the best Christmas movie EVER, don't even bother trying to tell me A Christmas Story is the best one because you've all been brainwashed by the fact that's literally on for 24 hours. That movie is terrible.) and having make drinks. We opened gifts and had tiramisu and good times.

The next morning was French toast before heading into the city to spend Christmas day with Tom's family. Lots of people hanging out, bad movies watched (I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry is actually worse than I assumed, which I suppose is an impressive feat and WTF, why aren't you playing Christmas movies on Christmas day?) and food eaten. Tom and I didn't have a huge amount since it was essentially Christmas lunch and we had just had all that French toast. But don't worry, I have lots of pernil leftovers for today. On our way back home we realized that we would probably be hungry later and there wasn't much food at home so naturally we stopped for Chinese takeout.

I realize I just talked about the food we had because, you know, priorities.
But there were also some bookish gifts, and why not point those out?

Julie is an excellent Secret Santa and she sent over hazelnut & coffee chocolate, these caramel wafers that are THE BEST, an adorable dino ornament, wine stoppers (important bookish accouterment), and 2 books (Coronado by Dennis Lehane and Beirut Blues by Hanan al-Shaykh).

Mom got me a Barnes & Nobel gift card so additional new books will be forthcoming! I haven't decided which ones yet. But picking up out is half the fun. And, while not actually a book, Tom got me the entire collection of Harry Potter movies.
A million years ago (or 2007), after the 5th movie came out, Tom was going to get me the set of HP movies for Christmas but decided against it, since not all of the movies were out yet. I commended him on this choice, as having a 1/2 complete set would drive me nuts when the other movies came out and nothing matched up. At that point he promised he would get me the set of movies once they were all out. When I told him how long that would be (and I didn't even know they'd be splitting the last book into 2 movies) he made a comment about how we'd better be married by THAT point. The fact that we got married this summer and he got me the movies this Christmas is somewhat coincidental, as he had been waiting for a movie set that had all of the bonus stuff and not JUST the movies. But it worked out nicely that all promises were kept. And now I can say I married him to get the full set of Harry Potter movies.

I have a couple days off so I plan on spending them watching ALL the movies, catching up on blogging, maybe getting some reading done. And of course eating.