The first real activity of my trip came Saturday morning - ok so it may have been Saturday afternoon - when my dad (Dennis) and I went out to get the Christmas
tree. Since my parents live out in the boonies where the redwood trees grow like weeds we usually selectively thin the groves each year by one tree. It should be mentioned at this point in the story that for most years my mom (Catie) and little sister (Ceara) have stood on the back deck and supervised my dad and I. This particular year my sister was not back from college yet and it was raining, thus keeping my mom indoors. Unable to find a single tree that we liked, my dad and I focused our efforts on an old trunk of a tree that was growing parallel with the ground and had died out at the end. Growing straight up out of this portion of the tree were four small trunks. They were all rather skinny and none of them had all that many branches...Before long my mother was standing on the covered portion of the back deck inquiring why there were three trees laid out on the hottub cover. My dad and I enthusiastically explained to her that if we tied the three of them together with bailing wire and duct tape we would have a nice big full tree with plenty of branches to hang all of our ornaments on. At present I am fairly certain that my parents have the only 12 foot tall three trunked Christmas tree in town. Maybe even the state, if not the entire country. Now that it is all decorated it looks fabulous. Hell, Ceara hasn't even noticed its uniqueness yet.
Saturday evening I attended Dan and Emily's (different Emily from Julie's sister) annual Christmas Party. All, well, almost all, of my friends made it and it was really great to get to catch up with all of them. For the most part people are doing the same things that they were the last time I saw them in May, but a few people have changed positions within the companies that they are working for and other have moved on to entirely new things to pursue other interests.
We also conducted our traditional white elephant (yankee swap) gift exchange game where everyone brings a wrapped gift and they are opened one at a time in a randomly determined order. Gifts are stolen from each other according to the rules and eventually everyone goes home with a gift. Some pleased. Some not so pleased. This year I really wanted the nerf dart guns, but I wound up with the new release of Office Space on DVD. I think that I came out ahead seeing as how all I brought was a gift pack of Hawaiiana touristy stuff.
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