Gifts

For no real reason, I have decided to tell the story of our wedding in reverse order. I suppose this does increase the chances I will have a really really good picture of my beautiful bride by the time I want to talk about the wedding day, but that thought had not occurred to me until just now.

Wednesday of the week after our wedding, Heather and I started the day near Tabernash Colorado, in a really awesome little cabin. Packing up took a lot longer than I was expecting. Checkout was slated for 11-ish, and I figured we could beat 11 by at least 30 minutes. We ended up missing by about 30 minutes… welcome to married life I guess 🙂 Our hosts weren’t too worried about our checkout time so it really didn’t matter.

Our drive out of the mountains was somewhat complicated by wind. Wind shouldn’t be that big of a deal, but every night we had gotten one – two inches of powdery snow. The snow was blowing into near whiteout conditions on some of the early areas of the drive. Fortunately that didn’t last long, but the road was fairly slick for the first hour or so of our drive.

Once hitting Denver, we discovered the main route to the airport was closed for the day, but my awesome navigator wife managed to plot a new path to the airport using the dinky little map that came with our rental car. We made it to the airport without any trouble after that. Once in the airport, we managed to get moved up to a flight leaving five hours sooner than our original departure time. (we hadn’t planned on driving straight to the airport from the bed and breakfast, but were ready to come home by Wednesday) The change wasn’t free, but was well worth it.

I am not sure if its good or bad, but we made it back with time to tackle the mountain of gifts waiting for us in the apartment. This picture was taken after we were quite a ways into the process:

( Sorry about the really small size of these pictures, wordpress is being a pain about squishing the aspect ratio of pictures unless I keep them smaller than the width of the text area. I could post thumbnails and link to images posted somewhere else on the site, but getting the posts up is enough of a project right now)

We had a pretty good system for the gifts, Heather logged items to a master spreadsheet:

While I opened gifts:

After a few hours, we had everything unwrapped, and some of it put away. Unfortunately we ran out of energy before dealing with the packaging:

It was probably bad planning to pile it all in front of the door when we had to go to work in the morning. To be honest I don’t remember what we did… I guess we must have just dug a path and then carried it all down the next day.

-Jordan

Christmas day in Kearney started with roughly twenty people all digging into their stockings. It wasn’t as chaotic as it might sound, but still somewhat intense for the first thing out of bed.

Technically breakfast started before stockings I guess, and then continued after… I don’t know where to throw this in, so its going here…

Food over the entire trip was amazing. There were so many sweets around it was overwhelming, and they were all really good. Heather again earned my undying respect by resisting it all, and not even complaining about not being able to eat sweets during Christmas.

In the back ground of the morning was the challenge of cycling 20+ people through 2 showers and 3 bathrooms. Everyone gets along really well or I suppose things could get uncomfortable. Somehow everyone got ready in time, and by mid morning we were all assembled to start the formal process of opening gifts.

I don’t think too many families approach Christmas gift opening as a “one person at a time, one gift at a time” occasion, but its tradition, and I have to say I am fairly attached to all the Christmas traditions. We always open gifts in order of age, and this was the monument where it finally hit me that Heather is a little younger than my sister. The gift opening process took a while, but as always, was a lot of fun with everyone there. I somehow managed to surprise Heather by giving her an ice scraper, despite her having specifically asked me for it, and only it.

After we finished with gifts, we had the traditional Christmas dinner, fitting everyone into one big room downstairs. Throughout all of this it was really fun for me to see Heather get a chance to interact with my extended family. I really enjoy spending time with them, and wanted Heather to feel at home… I think that process started at least 🙂

After dinner we had a few hours of downtime (or maybe I am forgetting something already). Then it was off to the church to meet with the extended-extended family. My mom’s cousins etc, I don’t know what the proper term for them is. We had a few more hours to hang out and talk to people, then more food, then more gifts! Once we finished cleaning up the church, we headed back to the house.

I think we probably could have fit a little more into Christmas day, it didn’t seem that busy to me at the time, but writing it all down we did a lot. At any rate, that covers the high point of day two.

-Jordan

The Homecoming

Christmas, Day Two