Christmas in Oregon - 2009

Well, here we are near the end of January, and I'm finally getting around to writing a post about our Christmas trip to visit my family in Oregon this year. Among all the typical excuses I might give for the delay is a brand new one: there's been a debate going on in our house lately with respect to our blog. The key point of the debate is that my wonderful wife feels like the time has come for me to extend my blogging efforts being my typical habit of only writing about hunting and fishing trips. For awhile, I put up a valiant fight. After all, I'm far too busy to do this kind of thing on a regular basis right? Not right. I lost. I admit it. And so, here I am, making my first attempt at a non-fishing or hunting related blog...so bear with me.

For all intents and purposes the first half of our trip was spent with my mom (Linda) and her side of the family in Portland. One bonus this year was that my sister (Danielle) was also able to make it back to Oregon from North Carolina for the holidays. She's a travel nurse, and her job has taken her all over the place, so it's been awhile since we've seen her, and we were grateful for the opportunity. Anyway, on Christmas eve we all got together with our extended family on my mom's side for a big dinner. It was a really good time, and below are some pictures of that night.

From left to right are my sister (Danielle), my grandma on my mom's side (Camilla), and my mom (Linda).

Here I am explaining the finer points of how to capture an elk from a helicopter to my grandpa (Leo).

And here we all are getting ready to dive into our Christmas eve dinner.

As a general rule, we typically spend Christmas morning with my mom and have a big breakfast and present opening there, and then we spend the afternoon and evening with my dad (Larry) and step-mom (Julie). This year was no exception. On Christmas morning my mom made us (me, Kathleen, and my sister) our traditional Christmas breakfast: biscuits and gravy. Then we got down to business...

My sister takes her first bite of the biscotti Kathleen made her for Christmas.

This is the wreath Kathleen made my mom for Christmas.

And here I am, about to open the new racquetball racket that would soon become my tool of choice for, well, playing racquetball.

Christmas night with dad and Julie was pretty entertaining too, and, much to the dismay of certain of my family members, I will be sharing some of that entertainment in video form below. The main source of all the entertainment came in the form of two games for the Wii that dad and Julie got one of Julie's daughters, Theresa, and her husband Brian, for Christmas: Rock Band and American Idol. Talk about some hilarious fun! I won't take time to explain how the games work here, because the videos do a pretty good job of making that clear. Now, my sister has always been a bit of a ham, but my dad is usually a little more reserved. As you can see though, there are times when exceptions are made...enjoy (especially you, dad ;)...

So, first of all, this video was too big to post as is, so I had to compress it, which required downloading a trial version of some compression software. Unfortunately the result is that there is now some annoying green lettering across the top of the video advertising the software I used. Oh well, at least I was still able to post it. Thanks to the magic of YouTube we were able to embed the original, non-compressed, video! Enjoy! This, as you probably guessed, is my dad and sister singing YMCA as a duet competition on the American Idol game. For better or worse, this video provides a rarely glimpsed insight into my family...and their performance abilities. Good stuff.

Well, to be at least moderately fair about this whole thing, I figured I'd better also post an embarrassing video that has me in it. So, I chose this one of my sister and I doing a "Spice Girls" song on rock band. I played the guitar line and she sang. As mind-numbingly dumb as this song is, I have to admit that this was a lot of fun...especially watching my sister sing it.

Well, there you have it. The level of underutilized talent in my family is amazing. I'm not really sure why we don't have any professional musicians in the family given what you've seen here, but hey, what can you do? Anyway, one of the other things that's always fun about visiting dad and Julie is the chickens. In the relatively recent past, they acquired half a dozen chickens so that they could start producing their own eggs. They've got them all named and it's pretty fun to listen to them interact. Plus, we got to bring 2 dozen eggs home. Here's some pictures.


Well, that's about it for the pictures. We did lots of other fun stuff while we were there, including quite a bit of eating out, going to movies, archery, and just hanging out with family. Overall, it was a great trip, and we're already looking forward to the next one!