Beware - I’m writing a novel here.

So we had Christmas at my house this year. It was a lot of stress, a lot of people, and a lot of fun.

It started out at around 7pm on Christmas Eve. I had all the cookies ready, my lasagna was in the oven, and I didn’t have time to do my bruschetta (that will have to wait until New Year’s). The family started coming over, bringing a whole assortment of dishes. One new thing this year was that there was an abundance of desserts. We rarely have desserts at the parties - other than my one aunt who always brings desserts and Claudine’s annual cookies. But this year we had sponge cake, banana bread, Baker’s square pie, passionfruit mouse, and more. There was almost too much food to fit on my dining room table!

I was still cooking as people were coming in. I started to make the pinwheels as my aunt was frying her eggrolls in the deep fryer. The phenomenon of me cooking was so amazing to the titas (aunts) that they stopped what they were doing to watch me make my pinwheels. I felt so much pressure! It was like a show. They were all so happy to see me being domestic. My one tita said, ‘Christine, if your mom were here watching, she’d be so proud of you!’ Aww, thanks. *sniff* I wish she was there, too.

There were a TON of presents, and I didn’t even thing to take a picture of all of them. The picture that you see here is only one side of the tree - imagine that the other side has just as many presents! The funny thing is that about 70% of those presents are for the four little kids. Jillian herself got about 25 presents. Oh, to be 2 years old again!

Before heading out to church, I wanted to play a game that I stole off of Dan’s family parties. People are divided into groups, then each group has a sheet of paper with 50 lines on it. There are several sheets of paper that are then passed around between each group with photos of celebrities/famous faces on it, and they have to guess who those people are. There was a bit of resistance at first - our family NEVER plays games. But it’s my house - I make the rules! But as soon as they got into it, people were really consumed with the game. In the end, it turned out pretty fun. I tried to make it so everyone could participate - using some cartoon characters for the kids, Filipino actors for the adults, rappers for the teens (the only teen being Marilyn, actually), and sports figures for the Dave-type people. There were a couple hard ones, too - maybe I’ll post up the pictures later so you all could play, too.

Midnight mass, which was actually at 11pm, was alright. I fell asleep a couple times (if you’ve been keeping count, I haven’t been sleeping much lately). But it was nice to be there with my whole family - and we took up several rows at the church. We walked out of the church to see that there was a light snow falling - yay, a white Christmas!

We came back to my place, took our annual family pictures. Everyone was itching to pass out the presents, so as soon as family pictures were over, my uncle put on the Santa hat and I did my elven duties to hand him presents. Once all the presents were handed out, everyone opened their presents at once. Since I’m married now, I got a lot of joint presents, but it was all stuff that we really needed for the house - like a food chopper, a deep fryer and comforters. I also got some cool stuff - like ‘The Return of the King’, an Urlacher jersey (who ISN’T over rated, by the way) and snowboarding goggles.

After the presents, the titos and titas headed downstairs to play mah-jong (which they did for the next 18 hours - there was a bed they set up down there to cat nap). We threw in ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkhaban’ to watch. I fell asleep at the end. But at around 5am I had to wake up to take my dad to the airport. I got back to find some people asleep on the couches, but others still awake. They were trying out some of the video games that they got. Marian and Fatima wanted to watch Shrek 3-D so I passed out the 3-D glasses and threw it in for them to watch. I headed upstairs for a little catnap.

Upstairs I found Claudine, Dan, and Dave sleeping on my bed, with a pillow separating Dave and Dan. (Dan had felt sick that day, so he missed a lot of the festivities) There was still room for me (aren’t king beds the best?) so I slipped in for a little nap. All we needed was Fatima and we would have been complete.

I got up an hour later to find people still up downstairs. Maui was checking out the pictures from the night before. He was making CD’s for people to take home.

At around 11am on Christmas Day, the basement mahjong people started coming up searching for food - which there was a lot of. Basically, we were eating all day - desserts and regular food. Once they had something to eat and went back downstairs, we cleared out my kitchen table for some poker. Dan got a new poker chip set and we wanted to try it out. The game was Texas Hold ‘em and we debated about what to play for. We toyed around with the idea of playing for gift cards/presents, but none of us really wanted to part with them. So then we were thinking of a $20 buy in. Then we realized we were all poor. So it was $1 to buy in. We were playing for a mere $7. But the play was heated - people were playing like we were playing for $14! Just kidding. There were some really good hands that were played, and after a while people started going all in and falling out. It came down to me and Dan - the protégé and the master. There were 2 aces on the table, and I was betting big. Dan knew there was a chance I had another ace, but he called me on it, because he had an ace, too. He called me all-in and we showed our cards - and I beat him with a full house. Whoo hoo!

Afterwards we headed out to our traditional Christmas Day movie - “The Incredibles”. Loved it. Even though I fell asleep a couple times during the first hour. It is such a sweet story, I recommend you go see it if you haven’t seen it before.

We came back to the house to continue our 24 hour food fest. All the adults had left already, so it was just the kids that were left over. We all said our goodbyes and ended the day. Marian, Fatima, Claudine and Marilyn stayed overnight for more fun. My best friend Jaygee, who is home for the holidays from New York, stopped by with her family. She came by and gave me “Carmen Elektra’s Aerobic Striptease” because she said as soon as she saw it, she thought of me. What the –!?!? We had a good time watching it - we didn’t try it. But it looked like fun.

After Jaygee left, we finished up “Return of the King” which we had started earlier. Then I was so tired that I don’t really remember what happened after that.

Woke up on the 26th and ate some left overs. We cleaned up the rest of the stuff and watched ‘An American Wedding’. Claudine had to get going and she was driving so the gals started to pack up. But before they left we tried out the aerobic striptease and we had a LOT of laughs with it. We’re definitely going to try those moves the next time we go out to bars!

So the gals went home, and the tiring, wonderful, stressing, fun, heartwarming weekend was over.

Until next year!

I didn’t take a lot of pictures, but here’s a couple of mine:

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