We had a pretty good Christmas here at Our Humble O’Bode — how about you?

I was the first out of bed this morning. My Darling B was the second, and after that it really didn’t matter because we ended up waiting until about ten o’clock to open presents on account of Tim’s cat barfing. It wasn’t the first time we waited impatiently while the kids took their time getting to the tree.

Which was a rosemary bush this year, by the way. When B brought it home from the store last week I thought, That poor thing’s got about a month, tops, to live. Normally I’m the one who can’t keep a house plant alive and B’s the one with the green thumb, except when it comes to rosemary plants. She kills them all without even trying. I decided to make it my mission to keep it alive until spring when I could transplant it to the yard. So far, so good. Two weeks later and it’s still green and looking healthy. If it’s trying to lull us into a false sense of security, it’s doing a great job.

The prezzies were arranged on a table the rosemary was sitting on and nobody thought it was all that weird, but just weird enough to make it feel right. The good stuff was all in the stockings, anyway.

Dinner was a big-ass ham and potatoes, and the after-dinner entertainment was Trivial Pursuit. This year, we mixed the cards from the book-lover’s edition with the silver-screen edition, just to make it interesting. Can’t say we did any better than playing it straight, but I can say we had a lot of fun doing it that way.