My BFF, Tracey, picked me up from the airport on the Tuesday night before Christmas, and we touched boobs while modeling the new chevron necklaces she bought us:

This is us trying not to smile.

My parents were out of the state until Sunday, so I spent the rest of the week at Tracey’s, watching “Sex and the City” for the first time, finding out that it’s teeeeerrible both fashion-wise and supposedly-portraying-women-as-independent-but-actually-portraying-them-as-lonely-and-shallow-wise, cleansing my palate with the muuuuuch better “Girls”, crying over every episode of “Enlightened”, taking pictures of Tracey’s cats, eating all of the fast foods, reliving our childhoods with Return to Oz, The NeverEnding Story, and Labyrinth, wishing we had the RiffTrax version of Twilight, and making fudge. Cake batter fudge.

I got to do a photoshoot with Tracey’s brother, his wife, their toddler, and their brand new baby at the Franklin Park Conservatory. This is not a picture of them but of a piece from the Aurora Robson exhibit made, basically, of trash:

We tried the famous meatloaf at Cap City Diner and ate ice cream at Jeni’s partly because it’s splendid and partly because every food blogger on the Internet is obsessed with it, and I can make them jealous since Jeni’s only has physical locations in Ohio and Tennessee:

My first Christmas party began on Sunday afternoon with my cousin Bethany and me making chocolate peppermint rolls and ended with my cousin Keith and uncle Bob flashing me while I was innocently trying to take a family picture:

My dad’s side of the family gathered on Monday night, and chaos ensued when we moved the festivities to the basement, where the children were allowed to don their Iron Man masks and take boxes for hands. We used to hand out gifts one at a time, with the youngest person unwrapping a present first while the rest of us sat on our hands and so on until the oldest person had opened a gift and then back to the beginning, but it’s a free-for-all now, as the wrapping paper shreds on the floor would indicate:

Tuesday was lunch with my stepmom’s family, where all of the food used to seem so strange to me (corn pudding?) but that I now look forward to all year. I swear my stepbrother Josh and my stepsister’s twins, Hanna and Hope, were displaying this much familial love without me having to prod them:

Tracey and I and her husband, Dan, went to play cards with our friends Erin and Jenn as an excuse to see their new house, which is actually a very old house with tons of tiny, hidden doors leading to nowhere. They found the plans for the house in the basement which included a provision for only allowing white people to live there. Unapologetically racist!

We also saw our other-best-friend-from-high-school, Katie, and her kids, Maria and Evelyn:

We’d been trying to convince Katie to leave the girls with her husband so we could all get crunk and hit on boys at The Cheesecake Factory, but Katie somehow tricked us into coming to her house instead. I wanted to be mad at her, but dammit, I like those kids:

It snowed on Christmas Eve and was frosty enough that the snow stuck around the entire time I was there, creating some annoyingly picturesque views from our house:

Less annoying once my dad got out the Bobcat and found our driveway again:

My stepmom keeps the loveliest, most comfortable home full of antiques arranged in ways that would make magazine editors pee, and even her Christmas tree is always a sight to behold:

But it ain’t all classy:

My parents were about to have the floors redone in two of their rooms, so as I was saying goodbye, they were moving everything into other rooms. Not my dad’s hunting boots, though. They’ll construct the new floor around those. j/k. I’m just trying to lighten the mood light to keep myself from crying over the loss of the old floor.

CHRISTMAS!

And now I’m off to read every. single. blog post. you made while I was gone.