With a buttload of families to see during the holidays, Christmas can be complicated.  Thankfully, it starts out simply, just the way it should.  With cinnamon rolls.

That’s the wreckage of what was left over from my annual Christmas Cinnabun.  Some families leave homemade cookies out for Santa and wake up to the smell of homemade pastries wafting through the house.  My family makes a Christmas Eve run to the mall for white flour and trans fats.  Deeee-licious.  (This year we did supplement with some hippie cinnamon rolls that I brought from home- Sin Dawgs by Dave’s Killer Bread.  With their organic whole wheat flour and hefty dose of flax seeds, they may look healthy, but holy crap are they delicious.  Cinnabuns still hold a sentimental place in my heart, but if you have any way to get a hold of Sin Dawgs, do it.)\

Once we had ingested enough sugar, we moved on to presents. My mom definitely made out the best this year, scoring a swanky TAG watch from my dad.  Of course, she was even happier to open OUR presents-

A head scarf for her upcoming trip to Egypt.

And a Bumpit!

Okay, so she still has to master the art of the Bumpit- we’ll work on that.  My dad, however, totally dug it and has asked her to where it basically every time they leave the house.  This is ENDLESSLY amusing for me.

After we opened presents, my lazy family watched The Hangover while I slaved away in the kitchen.

Jimmy and Amy joined us.

Trust me, the food was better than their faces imply.  I’m just a horrific photographer.

After we ate, we were supposed to go visit Mike’s mom for a Christmas gift exchange.  Unfortunately, her father-in-law ended up having to go to the hospital.  He’s a nice guy, so Mike and Amy and I headed over to say hi.

They had their own Christmas feast.

We hung out, chatted, and I made some progress on Amy’s already-belated-birthday-knitting gift:

And that was Christmas Day.

One more celebration to go!

Traditionally, we spend Christmas Eve with Mike’s dad’s family.  They have their holiday celebrations down to a science- lots of kids, lots of pretty wrapped boxes, and lots and lots of food.  But it definitely has it’s own special spin on the process.

Dumplings, spring rolls, green papaya salad, noodles and mac n cheese.  Guess who contributed that?

aunts and orchids.

We ate.  A lot.

Highly competitive ping-pong tournaments.

Presents.

LOTS of presents.  Hey, when you have 28 people in one house, the wrapping paper really adds up.

Mike and I had a total of 2 presents wrapped before we arrived and about 20 to give out, so we did what any good older cousins do- we made the younger ones do all the wrapping.  (There is a culturally insensitive sweatshop joke that should go here, but I’m not feeling very clever.)

Passing out gifts.

Giving and receiving.

The best part of Christmas- happy kids.  (We know that kids take Christmas seriously- when we first walked in the door, a herd of boy cousins came up to Mike and said “We know you work at Microsoft and get a discount on Xbox stuff, so we have big expectations for you guys this year.”  Thankfully, Mike was able to score some cheap games and we had some happy campers. For the girls, the Wacom Bambu tablets we gave CK and Havanah were big hits.)

I seriously love these two kids.  They were both flower girls at our wedding and I still dig them.  Then again, I am a sucker for kids who can make a fort out of anything, even Christmas presents.

This is Emily, the other girl cousin.  Equally adorable.

Andrew and Phong are a little too old to be adorable, but I dig them too- especially Andrew’s little mohawk.

Older kids (ok, Tony and Amy don’t even count as kids anymore) are way less cute, but deserve good Christmas nonetheless.

This photo doesn’t really fit anywhere, but it makes me laugh.

Merry Christmas!

Between working from home, visiting friends and family and celebrating the holidays, I am WAY behind on blogging.  I will get around to doing a full recap of all 3 of our Christmas adventures, but not tonight.  Tonight I’m tired and slightly nauseous.

I’m tired because I’ve been running non-stop since a 9:00 am spin class led by an instructor who broke out into a full Rockettes-style high kick number in the middle of class  (that’s what happens when you go tot he 24 Hour Fitness across the street from the Disneyland Cast Member Parking lot) followed by brunch, knitting, yogurt and catching up with a couple of particularly fantastic friends.  I’m nauseous because Jimmy, Mike and I joined Mike’s dad and grandparents for dinner at a very fobby Chinese restaurant.

Mike’s dad ordered a feast for the six of us- shell-on prawns, sauteed pea sprouts, a whole fried fish, steamed clams, fried tofu and seafood hot pot.

The clams went fast and furious.

Yes, that’s ice in the beer glass.

The real star of the show was the hot pot.

Swimming in that broth you’ll find shrimp, lobster, squid, fish, mushrooms, sea sponge and some weird balls.  I still don’t know what those balls were.  Jimmy told me they were lychee (wrong), Mike said he thought they were either fish stomachs or “poop holders” (I don’t even want to know), and his dad just called them “fish balls.”  Mike’s grandparents, who don’t speak English, just stared at me disapprovingly and probably wished Mike had married a nice quiet fertile Asian girl with a graduate degree.

Naturally, Mike, Jimmy and I decided to keep things mature and appropriate and started daring each other to eat the stuff in the soup.  Jimmy volunteered to go first and ate a mushroom.  In case you’re wondering how eating a mushroom counts as adventure, you should know that 2 years ago, Jimmy called all vegetables “salad” (as in “I want a cheeseburger, no salad”) and would only eat Romaine lettuce drenched in ranch dressing.  So a mushroom is a big step.

He liked it!  Well, he didn’t exactly like it, but he survived.

Mike went next.  He tried to eat a fish ball.

He failed.

Even though Mike had failed, I soldiered on and went face to face with the sea sponge.

That shit is nasty.

The taste wasn’t terrible- it really just tasted like sea water.  The texture… well, that was a whole different story.  That’s where the face comes from.

I did it though- I swallowed the sponge and kept it down (even if the oil in the food made me fairly sick later.)  And just as we finished dinner, the entire restaurant was suddenly serenaded by the most random musical trio I’ve ever seen anywhere in my life, let alone in the middle of a Vietnamese-owned Chinese seafood restaurant.

I have no idea what they were doing there.  But somehow, it was a fitting end to the night.

Time: 4:05 pm
Location: brea, ca
Listening to: old Dave Matthews
Temperature: 72 degrees
Number of giant glowing orbs in the sky: 1. And that’s all we need.

Time: 1:46 pm
Location: the last road stop before the grapevine
I don’t have any really good numeical values to put here. We stopped because mike was starving and sick of my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. This was out table after he finished eating:

Time: 12:01 pm
Location: somewhere in the middle of California where cows outnumber people (no, not chino hills)
Listening to: malcom mcdowell’s TED talk
Hours we’ve spent actually driving so far: 15 hours
Hours til we arrive in orange county: 4 (hopefully) (mike says 3)
Miles we’ve driven so far: 1,000 (mikes trip odometer resets at 1000)

Time: 7:00 am
Location: leaving redding, ca
Listening to: hey lover by ll cool j w/ boyz II men (circa 1997)
Drinking: starbucks triple americano black, 1 stevia (I already miss Seattle coffee) (me); mango naked juice (mike)
How awesome is my dad for letting us use his wealth of hotel points and get a free, non-grody hotel room last night: immeasurable
Miles driven so far: 680
Miles to go: 500

Time: 1:42 pm
Location: a rest stop south of Eugene but north of Medford
Listening to: TED talks
Number of naps taken: 2
Number of electronic gadgets that have crapped out on us so far: 1 (our gps died- WTF?)
Number of electronic gadgets we’ve spontaneously bought on the road: 1 (a radar detector that we’re returning as soon as we get home. Suckaz.)

Time: 10:00 am
Location: mother’s bistro, Portland, OR
Number of calories consumed: I don’t want to know

We made it to Portland just as my absolute favorite breakfast place in the world was opening, so we were able to eat without a wait. (By the time we finished the wait was an hour and a half.). Why was it so important to get the timing just right? Because this is the home of the greatest biscuits in the world.
Next, a quick stop to stock up on water and contact solution, and we’re off.

Time left: 5:32 am
Injuries sustained while walking to the car: 1 (I twisted my ankle. Shut up. Walking is hard.)
Currently listening to: spice girls “I wanna make you holler” (it’s sentimental)
En route to: a stop at the Microsoft campus so mike can drop off the gifts he forgot yesterday, then straight to Portland for breakfast. Fingers crossed that we’ll get near San Francisco by night.