Karl and Angela Rees

Oh, it’s that wonderful time of year again where you can snuggle inside with your loved one and sip hot cocoa and look at the Christmas tree and all the pretty white snow while you’re listening to Christmas songs and envisioning dancing sugarplums, all the while almost forgetting about the fact that its so freezing cold outside. Of course, every day with Angela is Christmas, but now that it’s really Christmas that makes it doubly special.

It’s a little odd to think about what we did earlier this week, because the mood of the last few days has been so vastly different than the mood of Monday through Thursday. That’s one of the many bad thing about Finals running up so close to Christmas. We lost a lot of the December spirit to days and sleepless nights of Karl’s endless studying. Well, Karl took a Final on Monday and another on Wednesday, and then did a take-home Final on Thursday. He’s not going to impress anybody with his tax scores, he thinks, but he thinks he did very well on the other two. At any rate, he’s just happy to never have to spend so much time studying for Finals again (next semester he’ll just have two very light Finals).

Angela meanwhile was very supportive of Karl, making him food and giving him hugs in between her puzzles and other distractions. She was bored at work most of the week. She even took another sick day off on Tuesday for a doctor’s appointment. Oh, we forgot to mention in our last letter about our Christmas party the Friday before last that she put together almost entirely by herself. It was a turkey dinner, followed by games with our guests Dan & Kimiko, and Tina & Ruston.

Thursday night the festivities began. For Karl it was like he suddenly woke up from a long December daze and it was Christmas! Karl’s brother Chris and his wife Katie came over, as well as Katie’s parents and sister, to watch a good old fashioned butt-kicking by BYU. Seriously, if BYU had just been a little more awake in their first few games, they’d have been in a championship game. They were that good this year. Anyway, we brought the projector out and had pizza and Thai food while we chatted and watched little Davin run around. It was fun.

Friday, Karl caught up on correspondence and did a little wrap-up editing and administration for the journal while Angela worked until 2:00. Then we played. We made Vietnamese food for dinner, watched “Scrooged,” played all sorts of games, and went window-shopping. Karl also wrapped Angela’s presents. Wrapping presents, by the way, is one of his least favorite things to do ever. All that work and expense, just for something that’s going to be torn off in a few seconds. Oh well, you can’t fight the gift-wrapping industry.

Saturday morning Karl tried to play Frisbee, but no one was there, so he dropped by to visit his Aunt Ginette in the hospital and bring her some presents. After he came home, we went up the canyon to play in the snow. It’s quite beautiful up there. The snow was too powdery for building snowmen, but there’s plenty of other things to do when you have a tarp, a camera, and creative minds. In the evening we headed down to Provo to see the lights on Center Street and have dinner at our favorite Mexican place, Los Hermanos. Then we cam home and played more games and watched some more movies.

We slept in nice and late this morning. We prepared the traditional potato salad in the morning (we tried it with store-bought Mayonnaise this year—not quite the same, but still good). Then we rushed off to church for choir practice. We then had fun singing in the choir during church—it was a little funny when the pianist and conductor botched up “Joy to the World” so bad that we ended up singing the last verse twice, but it’s hard to be upset about things like that when you’re singing Christmas music. This evening we’ll have Karl’s traditional German Christmas Eve dinner—potato salad, deviled eggs, and bratwurst. Then we’ll drive through some neighborhoods looking at Christmas decorations. And then we’ll sit down and read Christmas stories around the Christmas tree. It’s our first Christmas alone together—time to start making our own little traditions.

Merry Christmas everyone! Peace on Earth, goodwill towards men.