Not Quite Christmas
We have largely given up on the tradition of visiting with family at Christmastime. Instead, we’ve been having “Christmas in February”, where my sister and her family and Ray and I converge at my mother’s house sometime around her birthday in February. This year, since we have a trip which goes from December to February, we’re stopping in Denver coming and going. We passed through just before Christmas, and we’ll come back a few weeks after her birthday, but that’s how it happened to make the trip come out right. My mother has been having health problems recently, and we are trying to see her as often as we can.
It was also an opportunity to go to Boulder and see our friend Mike and his relatively new wife Cynthia, my high-school friend Dave, and Ray’s college friend Louis, who works in a book recycling operation and always finds some great gems that people have thrown away. This time he gave Ray a set of slang flash cards training vocabulary items like “aiight”, “beef”, “mad”.
Mostly we sat around the house with my mom, which in itself is quite enjoyable. It gave us an opportunity to rest up for the hard work that will undoubtedly occupy the rest of this trip.