I wrote a long post a few days ago about our plans for the holidays, and never got around to posting it because I thought I’d wait until it seemed more time-appropriate. And as it turns out, our plans? Didn’t so much happen. The top item on my agenda was that we’d go to church on Christmas Eve, even though I haven’t been to church once in the 4 1/2 years that I’ve lived here. I’m not a huge fan of organized religion, and it’s hard to find a church that that jives with my particular brand of laid-back liberal Christianity (read: no hellfire & brimstone). But, I love the Christmas Eve service, and it’s one of the traditions that I have with my family that I thought I would really miss this year. So I did some investigating and found a church: Methodist (of which I am half), in the middle of downtown Seattle, and one of the oldest buildings in the city (very cool). And they mentioned tolerance and acceptance on their website, so I was totally down with that. Then, since we were going to be downtown anyway, after church we were going to walk around and look at the lights, and have our nice little romantic Christmas Eve, just the two of us.

Yeah. How that played out? Early last week, Dave came down with some sort of cold/flu thing, so even if he could’ve stayed conscious for the entire hour-long church service (which was doubtful), he also has this incredibly scary cough that sounds like he’s dying of TB. We figured it wouldn’t have been too cool for us to subject the other church-goers to such horrifying sounds, so we stayed home. No downtown walking/looking at the lights, either. And probably no going to the movie theater today, since he still has the horrible cough. Darn it. I really wanted to see Narnia, too.

What we did do, instead, was have a ridiculously huge meal (some I cooked, and some that came ready-made from the supermarket), the leftovers of which we’ll be eating for the next week. My grandmother would be so proud. Well, she wouldn’t have been proud of the ready-made items, but I used her recipe for stuffing, and it turned out pretty good if I do say so myself. Meanwhile, Dave drank enough Bushmill’s that he was not feeling too shabby by dinnertime. (Alcohol kills germs, right?) And we watched the first Lord of the Rings movie. I’ve never seen any of them, so we rented the whole trilogy for the weekend. As for the first one…. hmm, I’m not sure what I thought of it. It was good, I guess, but toward the end I was getting antsy, like, “could we just wrap it up already, please??” Maybe it was all the festive holiday egg nog I drank (and by “festive,” I mean “containing large amounts of bourbon”), or maybe I just don’t have the attention span for 3 hour movies. It’s definitely making me re-think the whole idea of seeing King Kong in the theater.

Anyway, even though my plans got scrapped, and in spite of Dave being sick, it was still a very nice Christmas. I like that we spent our first Christmas as a married couple alone; and particularly in light of how sick Dave is, I’m really glad we didn’t have to fly anywhere. But I talked to everyone in my family last night, and Dave talked to his today, so it’s not like we’re totally disconnected out here. Overall it’s been really cool. Now if we can just figure out what the heck we’re doing for New Year’s…

Hope everyone is having a fantastic holiday weekend!