Wisconsin Christmas Once Again

Christmas has come to an end, though in a more usual fashion for us than the last month has been.

We spent Saturday with Kim’s side of the family celebrating Ukrainian Christmas. It helps that everyone who can be vaccinated has been, and that a majority of the people present have already had covid on top of that. We figured we’d be okay.

It’s been a while since we were able to do this. We were set to do this in January 2020 but between work schedules and people with the flu (remember that?) we ended up putting it off until Easter but by Easter everyone was in lockdown. We didn’t get to celebrate January 2021 either for obvious reasons. This year we figured we had a window of opportunity so we took it.

We got there in the late afternoon and settled in, visiting, snacking on various cookies and assorted other goodies, and hanging out. That’s what holidays are for, after all.

Eventually it was dinner time. Ukrainian Christmas is a lot like Italian Christmas in that there is far more food than anyone could possibly eat, all of it tasty, except that the nature of the carbs changes. Also, Kim’s side of the family is a lot more mobile than my side of the family – where my side has the ability to sit down at a dinner table and then not move for several hours, Kim’s side is a kaleidoscope of activity. And yet dinner gets eaten and conversations get had all the same.

There were gifts, mostly for the young’ns.

And then we played the dice game. For those of you new to this space, the dice game is where you buy two gifts within a set budget, wrap them, and put them in six piles on a table. Everyone takes turns rolling a die and picks a present from the appropriate pile until everyone has two unwrapped gifts in front of them. Then you set a timer and get a couple of pairs of dice and do quick rolls – if you get doubles, you can forcibly swap with people. It’s a fun way to do gifts without stressing out about it – there is general kibbitzing and oohs and ahs, and the swaps can get pretty ruthless.

Kim and I still had the gifts that we’d bought in 2019 for the January 2020 version of the game so we brought those. They were still good, though admittedly the “2020 Life Hacks Day-By-Day” calendar was a bit of a curio.

I ended up with an egg cooker that I gave to Lauren afterward – she will make much more use of it than I will, in her college dorm – and a knit Cthulu hat (here modeled by Lauren). Good for the Wisconsin winter and for consuming the souls of people who have irritated me recently – the perfect gift, really.

Merry merry, one more time.