The loot

Another Christmas day has come and gone.

Kimberly and Chris both worked until 3pm (and both Forsyth Medical Center and Walgreens were insanely busy, leading to a rather grumpy holiday...until we got home and unwound), so the festivities began late in the afternoon.

Honeybaked Ham, Honeybaked Turkey, Honeybaked Cornbread Stuffing, plus the famous Gordonian broccoli cheese casserole would all wait until after the frenzy of gift opening. The gifts were brought out from underneath the rotund Canadian Fir tree (I mean, look at that tree! It's FAT!), and the unwrapping let loose with reckless abandon.

Highlights for the day include two super sweet nutcrackers (we told you Chris was a nutcracker junkie) to flank the fireplace hearth,

a personalized corkboard world map to document "Chris and Kimberly's World Travels" (2008 German Oktoberfest here we come!),

and the coup d'etat, a Romanian cello and cello lessons for Kimberly!A teary-eyed Kimberly proclaimed this to be our "best Christmas ever" and I tend to agree. She's done with her nurse anesthesia masters program, so there is, GASP!, actual free time to engage in leisurely reading (she got books by Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama) and pursuing the mastering of the cello. (It's rent-to-own, so there's 90 days to find out if the cello will "stick" to get a substantial discount in purchasing it outright.) Chris may in fact finally get that piano repairman out here to replace the one broken piano wire and tune it up so he can retake lessons. A proper Gordon piano/cello duet would indeed be killer, dont'cha think?

Afterwards, we invited the neighbors over for dinner, wine, beer, dessert, and our gift exchange. Receiving the game Chocolate-opoly and also the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie on DVD? Sa-weet!!!

We reveled in our new clothes, our new books, our new grilling impelements and sauces, our new European travel guides, our new nutcrackers, and most of all: a cello, and called it a pleasant night.

We hope your Christmas was as wonderful as ours.