We finally opened presents at around 10:30 p.m. on Christmas night, after Hallmark finally stopped showing movies I hadn't seen before. Yes, that's sad. Anyway, Mom seemed to like her gifts and I liked mine--jewelry, DVD's and clothes, and a cool purse from Pat (whose house we're in). It was lovely to get to do it by an actual lit tree--just like days long, long ago for me.

We spent most of post-Christmas day pretty much lounging around and not doing much--I'm writing up Hallmark reviews for future posts and uh.....I have six out of ten done. Mom did what I call "MacGyvering a dinner," which is to say she got some recipe for some kind of breakfast bake, was missing a few ingredients and then decided to substitute a few others in. And at least one of those substitutions--stewy canned peaches in lieu of apples--did not go so well and the thing was kinda...wet. Ah well.

After a brief trip to CVS for post-Christmas stuff--I found a gingerbread ugly sweater cookie kit and a book on how to deal with difficult people, hah--we met up with Angelica, Gary, and Nicole for a delicious Thai dinner. I showed everyone my reindeer sweater (Gary pointed out that the reindeer all have horns so they're probably gay reindeer boinking, WHICH MAKES IT EVEN BETTER), and we heard about the surprise party Nicole is planning for tomorrow, and we're all gonna get together on New Year's Day.

After dinner, Nicole got together with a visiting friend to go see Star Wars, and the rest of us went to the Winchester Mystery House for their Christmas tour. I haven't been since college, but they decorate the place up and have themed trees decorated with things that Sarah Winchester liked (flowers, citrus, fancy glass). I think they do a shorter tour--the 50 minutes, not so much detail on Sarah WInchester's crazy--so they get more people in and out. They had lights and drinks, an amazing balloon artist, and on the hour they have actual snow machines going for a few minutes. Fun stuff for Californians--also the tour guide got to be all, "I can bet it's going to snow right...about... now..." come 8 p.m.

The whole experience was lovely and we all had a great time. And they have a super awesome gift shop, where I got myself some opal earrings, a pendant with my name on it (which is to say, they HADN'T run out of Jennifers), a giant Christmas light necklace, and a pretty butterfly ornament. It was pretty much a fancy random stuff store and I love those.

Anyway, it was quite an interesting experience, should any of you close enough to the place want to try it sometime. Just give yourself enough time to get there, because leaving an hour early was apparently not good enough for us--luckily, they were nice enough to move us to a different tour when we missed ours by over a half hour due to traffic.

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