Snapshots: The Christmas One, Of Course

A little late, because, well, Christmas. But lots of opportunities for photos!

Our priest celebrates Christmas Mass at five different churches that span a distance of over one hundred miles. So the services are split between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The Mass at our church is at 7 p.m. on Christmas Eve.

Church!

It's hard for modern lights to not look very glare-y in photos. This one through the church window is slighly less harsh.

This is the Christmas tree Poppy and I decorated on Wednesday after work/school.

The children first tried to get up at 4 a.m. to open presents despite clear instructions to wait until 5:30 a.m.("You said we could get up at 3:30!""No, son, I assure you I DID NOT.") After being sent back to bed, the revelry commenced at 5:30 a.m.

Christmas early-morning stocking dump.

A blurry shot of the after-opening scene.

One of the gifts opened was a remote-control unicorn, specifically requested by Poppy. I was very hesitant to include this on the list for the grandparents, because I hate stuff like this (electronics+weird girly stuff), but I did and my parents got it for Poppy. It is, indeed, as weird and creepy as I feared.

And has to be plugged into the USB port on my bedside table clock. (In the mouth? Why?)

But she absolutely loves the thing*, so I don't regret requesting it on her behalf.

Things took a turn for the distinctly more labor-intensive in the afternoon when A. and I had to do some manual labor to get my washing machine working. After many days of The Arctic Blast, the drain pipe for the washing machine was not draining. It drains out of pipe that runs under our (trailer) house and into the back pasture. 

We figured it was frozen. So we cut it where it comes out from under the house and flushed it with hose water when it got warm enough for the hoses to run. This required me to hack out a drainage trench with an adze.

It worked! Yay!

This enabled me to do three loads of laundry that were desperately needed.

My gift to myself this Christmas was clean clothes. Because I am all about self-care.

As soon as the boys saw the water flowing into the trench as the water drained out of the washing machine, they were very enthused about expanding the drainage trench.

Inadvertant Christmas entertainment.

Our Christmas feast featured tamales, as is traditional in New Mexico. 

Also eggnog and molasses cookies, which are not traditional here, but who cares? They taste good.

We actually made the tamales two days ago and kept them in the refrigerator.

The picture looks like so many happy little elves helping in the kitchen. In reality, there was a lot of jockeying for space at the counter and complaining about sticky masa or breaking corn-husk ties. So festive.

We had a very nice sunset to end the day.

It never looks as good in a photo, though.

When I went out to take that photo, I heard the dogs barking from a distance and saw them in the neighbor's pasture, barking furiously at a completely unimpressed bull.

They were entirely unrepentant when they came home in response to my call.

There you have it! Our Christmas, snapshotted.

* Its name, in case you were wondering, is Fantastic Great Brilliant. Because of course, according to Poppy, it is all those things.