Walk in the Glow of Each Other's Majestic Presence

Was there anything unusual about your birth?

I was born in the middle of an ice storm.

My mother was forty-three at the time and the doctors had warned her that I would almost certainly be deaf and might well have Down Syndrome. My father was recovering from kidney surgery.

Mom had arranged with a neighbor to drive her to the nearest hospital—half an hour away—and bring our car back so that my father could get his rest and join us the next day. But when the labor pains began around ten o’clock at night and my mother called Mrs. Bailey, she was too afraid to drive at night on the icy roads. My mother said that was fine, she would drive herself, if Mrs. Bailey would just come along to bring the car back after dawn. I’ve never heard any details of that drive, but they made it.

I was born about three-thirty in the morning. The call woke my father who said that for a third girl they could have waited until nine o’clock. He loved that story when I was younger, but later apologized to me, telling me that he little knew at the time just how lucky he was.

Did you have a favorite planet as a child?



My elder sister is eighteen years older than I am. She went off to college the year I was born--in fact, my baptism was postponed until the day after Anne's graduation, because the grandparents were already planning to travel to us that weekend. So throughout my childhood she was an intermittent presence, coming home on the weekends and holidays with a suitcase full of laundry and marvelous stories to share.

That was also the period when she was establishing her independence from my parents, the tail end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, a very different time from the Great Depression, in which my parents' values were forged. There were a lot of conflicts. Anne would say something provocative--sometimes deliberately, but mostly not--and Mom would say something dismissive and Anne would snap at her and Dad would defend her and attempt, in his booming bass, to explain why she was wrong. It was awful.

Not that I was immune from this--our father was very loving, but also a passionate man, with a big voice, and not the world's largest supply of tact. It was easy to feel that he was yelling at us when he got the least bit heated in his delivery. Beckie tended to duck and cover when Dad got going, but Anne and I never mastered that trick.

When Anne saw that her exchanges with Dad, or his lectures and criticisms of either of us, were upsetting me, she took me aside and told me to think about Jupiter. "It's beautiful," she said, showing me pictures of the Great Red Spot in National Geographic, "and it has thirteen moons. Learn their names."

When I was about eight, I decided that I wanted to learn to play bridge. Beckie happily gave up the spot at the table she'd never wanted and I got to play whenever Anne hadn't brought along a friend or lover who, while being otherwise generally unacceptable to my parents, would always be welcome if they could make a fourth.



Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto...

My dad always wanted to be a teacher and loved lecturing, but was not a great instructor. His explanations tended to be far too complicated, with too much information thrown in all at once. And when his pupil became confused, or forgot a key point, he would become frustrated and critical.



Amalthea, Himalia, Elara...

I was a terrible bridge player. I've never had a head for strategy and despite an excellent memory I've never been able to keep track of what cards are played. Bidding made little sense to me, even at its most basic level, and if my father--with whom I was almost always paired--tried any of the more complicated codes he tried to teach me, I could never grasp how I was supposed to respond. I struggled through each hand, veering between utter confusion and abject boredom, neither of which made for good play.



Pasiphae, Sinope, Lysithea, Carme, Ananke, Leda...

Of course, Anne was no joy to play with, either. Stressed out by my parents' critical attitude, she would chainsmoke and snap through the hands. One of the worst moments came when it was my turn to be the "dummy" (the partner of the winning bidder, who turns their cards face up and lets the winner play both hands against the other pair) and Anne said, in something much like her Wicked Witch of the West voice (a staple terror of my childhood) "You're the dummy, dummy!" I burst into tears, ran from the table and hid. She was terribly sorry, it was all a joke, but I just couldn't see the humor in it then.



Themisto, Metis, Adrastea, Thebe...

There were thirteen moons when I started playing. By 1979 there were seventeen. That was something that always startled me, the idea that our schoolbooks could be wrong, that new information was always arriving. When my mother studied chemistry in the 1940s she had to learn the nine amino acids by heart, but by the time I reached ninth grade biology there were twenty-three and no one expected us to know them all. Today we've identified seventy-nine moons. That would have lasted through several rubbers, at least.

What were your grandparents like?

I didn’t get to have a long relationship with any of my grandparents—the first died when I was three and the last when I was twelve. What I know of them is largely from stories told by my parents and sisters and, more recently, from going through the family memorabilia and finding photos, letters, and other artifacts that flesh out their stories.

These were my mother’s parents: Murphy and Mitt. He was a carpenter who always resented being made to leave school at fourteen, a resentment that manifested in his proudly and whole-heartedly supporting my mother in her education. He was a very quiet man, loving and gentle. Mitt was more feisty, with a temper that made her relationship with my mother problematic, but also many fears and anxieties—she was so terrified of thunder that she would hide under the bed when a storm blew up. They worked hard all their lives, keeping their farm going and the family fed through the Great Depression. Mom was always proud of the Sunday dinners, where up to twenty folks would come around after church to eat with them, because “there was always food at Miss Mitt’s”.

A lot of what I remember of them isn’t about them, specifically, but about the farm in North Carolina. I don’t remember them ever visiting, though they did when I was very little. It was always us, driving south and south forever, until finally arriving at their place. I remember the smell of the sandy dirt after the rain, the strangely pleasant, rotting smell of the cold house where the freezer was, and the warm, dry smell of the old tobacco barns in the sunshine. I remember drinking cold Mountain Dew from a bottle, back when you couldn’t get it up north and it was the taste of summer. I remember picking corn and beans out of the fields and playing at the feet of the women shucking and shelling the vegetables for dinner. There was always work to do.

On the morning of her 50th anniversary, my grandmother had a major stroke. There was nothing to be done in those days—they got her dressed and put her in a chair at the reception while friends and family trooped by to pay their respects and she had no idea who any of them were. That was a horrifying time for my mother, but I remember Granny as one of the best playmates—we would play “pretend” and make believe that she didn’t know my name, or that she was a little girl like me, or that she didn’t know her way around the house she’d lived in for decades, and she was utterly convincing. She would give me slices of white bread with cold butter as a snack. In the morning, I would slip out of the bed I shared with my mother in the front room, sneak as quietly through my grandfather’s dark, shaded room as a three year old could, and out onto the back porch, where my grandmother slept in a tiny storeroom, almost filled by her big bed. I would open the door and shout “Boo, Granny!” and she would holler “Boo, ‘Lizbeth!” and I would jump on her bed and we would play while the rest of the household got up and ready for the day. One morning I shouted, but she didn’t respond, and my mother remembered being woken by my screams over Granny’s body.

I only have a few vivid memories of my grandfather, despite his having outlived my grandmother by two years. They may even all have been from the same trip, when I was five. Beckie was fourteen that year and somehow Dad got the idea of teaching her to drive on the dirt roads around the farm. She managed to put the car in one of the drainage ditches—she didn’t have much beginner’s luck. Dad tried various strategies to get the car back on the road and as he worked, shouting occasionally for Beckie to hit the gas, I kept jumping up and down and saying “Should I go get Poppo? Can I go get Poppo now?” Dad said “You sound like you don’t believe we can do this,” and I responded very seriously, “I don’t.” They both laughed and Beckie said “At least she’s honest!” Finally, finally Dad said “OK, Elizabeth, go!” I raced down the track to the barn where my grandfather was working and he fired up the tractor and let me ride along, holding onto the strap of his overalls as we chugged back to haul out the car.

On the long summer evenings the family would gather on the porch of the house that Poppo built, watching the occasional traffic pass by on the road. I was tearing around, probably being a pest, and Poppo told me to run around the house and he would time me. I ran and I ran and every time I came back to the big, broad steps, he would tell me my time and then say “Do it again. Run faster now,” and I’d be off again. When we drove away, I twisted around in the back seat to watch him wave to us as we pulled out of the drive and onto the highway for the long drive back to New York. A few hours after we arrived home, Uncle MG called to say that Poppo had died.


My father’s parents were very different. Raised in Kansas and Michigan, they married and moved to New York in 1919. My grandfather tried to establish himself in the financial world, but after the man from the next office jumped out the window in 1929, Grandfather decided it was time to get out of the business by a safer route. He spent the Depression taking an array of jobs—setting up distilleries in Canada, working on the Chicago World’s Fair—many of which kept him away from home for long stretches, leaving my grandmother to raise Dad alone, or with the company of her father, who lived with them for several years. She desperately wanted a girl, but miscarried many times after Dad was born—we now know that she was Rh negative, but in those days it was just a tragic mystery. She thought the moon rose and set on my father and would hear no criticism of him. They wrote to each other every week for more than twenty years—I have reams of her letters to him, filled with the details of her life, that reveal a surprisingly funny, money-fixated woman devoted to her husband and her church, but delighted to travel and find adventure.

She was a wonderful grandmother when my eldest sister was little. She would arrive by train with her suitcases stuffed with presents for her namesake and spend a week or more before Christmas baking cookies that filled the entire dining room table. She was a snappy dresser, with a certain elegance, and everyone was shocked when she threw herself down on the sled with Anne and played in the Michigan snow. She thought Anne was the most perfect child in the world and sent her cards and letters and treats throughout the year and begged in her letters for news of Anne’s health and latest accomplishments.

A year before I was born, Grandmother had her first major stroke. Throughout my childhood she spent stretches in the nursing home, returning to sit awkwardly in a green power lift chair. Her face was partially paralyzed by strokes and her gaze was glassy and unfocused. My parents would set me on her lap, where she would pluck at my clothing with long fingers, or they would tell me to hug her. She smelled medicinal and unsettling and her ability to talk changed as her brain tried to rearrange itself after each stroke. By the time I was five, she needed constant care and was placed in a nursing home about half an hour south of our home upstate. My grandfather couldn’t bear to see his “brown eyed Peg” so debilitated and never visited her there, but my father drove down every Sunday afternoon, despite the fact that she often had no idea who he was and would sob for her “Dickie boy,” and wonder why he didn’t come instead of this balding, middle-aged man she didn’t recognize. Visiting her was about equal parts scary and boring, but I always enjoyed the drive there and back with my dad. She passed away when I was eight.

My grandfather always seemed like a very stern, somewhat distant figure. He and my grandmother lived in a two bedroom apartment in Mount Vernon and when we visited my mother would make up the couch cushions on the living room floor as a bed for me. After his many jobs in the 30s he landed as the Executive Secretary of the International Merchant Tailors’ Association, where the main part of his duties was to organize their annual conferences in exotic locations like Miami or Chicago. He would also entertain visiting members from other countries and their breakfront—the same one that stands in my dining room today, was filled with gifts from around the world. The less-breakable ones were kept in the righthand door of that cabinet and I was allowed to pull out the sake cups and figurines and create elaborate games and fantasies around them.

If we were there on a weekday he would take me into the office on the train and I would spend the morning being given busy work—I remember using the porcelain stamp licker and drawing on scrap letterhead. His long-time secretary, Irma, was a very fashionable woman and she would take me out at lunch to Saks Fifth Avenue or Macy’s and buy me “a good dress,” just about the only clothing bought for me in those years of handmades and hand-me-downs. We would have sandwiches at one of the local lunch counters and bring one back to my grandfather and then my Dad and Beckie, usually, would pick me up and we’d go on an afternoon adventure somewhere in the city. On Saturdays my grandfather would swap his suit jacket for a cardigan, but I can’t picture him without a tie, even after he retired at eighty. It was shocking to find photos of him working the farms as a teen in Abilene, wearing nothing but overalls and a straw hat.

He could be a real curmudgeon—I think he never really knew how to interact with children except by teasing. The only time I’ve been stung by a bee was when he told me it was bothering a flower and I should squeeze it out of there. Another time, when I was five and we were out to an Italian restaurant, he was horrified to see me pick up the shrimp from my scampi by the tails to eat it and was loudly critical of my mother for failing to teach me to peel shrimp with a knife and fork. He never understood my father’s calling to the ministry and often criticized what he saw as an incomprehensible failure by my father to prioritize money in his life. When he died, at eighty-six, he left us much better off, financially, than we had been. At his funeral the minister kept referring to what a Brooklyn accent rendered as “Mistah Huntah,” so my last memory of my grandfather is of struggling not to giggle in a pew full of black-clad family.

And then I turned twelve and all my grandparents were gone.

It's hard to decide which trip qualifies as "my first big trip," because travelling was something my family just did. The year before I was born my parents had taken my sisters to Europe on a six-week sabbatical trip, so that was the Big Trip often discussed throughout my childhood and I grew up eager to know when my turn for Europe would come. We lived in Upstate New York with grandparents just outside New York City and my mom's side of the family in North Carolina, so thousand-mile roadtrips south were something we did at least two or three times a year. I know that my first flight on an airplane was at six weeks, when my mother took me down to see my grandparents. My father led bustrips for church groups each year and I visited Montreal, Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington, DC that way, without remembering which city was which year. When I was in 3rd grade my mother was elected to the School Board and went each year to the national convention, taking my father and me along to Miami, Los Angeles, and San Francisco when the dates lined up with my school breaks. There were a lot of trips.

The one I'm going to pick is the trip to Florida when I was six. We drove down to North Carolina, as usual, and spent at least a few days visiting family there, but then continued on "South of the Border". Finally I got to visit that tourist mecca, familiar to anyone who's driven I-95 past the Mason-Dixon line. We visited a few more family members in South Carolina--my Aunt Myrl, who was really a first cousin of my mother's, and her sister, Margaret, as well as one of my mother's bridesmaids who had married a pediatrician and settled in Columbia. We drove down to Savannah and had a magical dinner at the Pirate's House. We continued driving and spent a day and night in Jacksonville, where my strongest memory is an exhibit at the Children's Museum where I could climb through a model of the human digestive tract and slide out the end, and my mother left one of her favorite dresses in a drawer at the hotel, so we had to turn around and drive back more than an hour down the road. We also spent a night in St. Augustine and went to the nighttime presentation of the history of that oldest settlement, of which I mainly remember flaming torches. We visited Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center and visited the Edwards, family friends with a daughter just my age. And then we went to Orlando! We spent two or three days at DisneyWorld--this was before even EPCOT was built. My memories of that visit to the park are mostly of standing in long lines, but the stories my family tell include me disappearing and coming back with the life story of everyone behind us in line, and me falling asleep in the Hall of Presidents and napping all the way through the American Revolution and the Civil War. I have clearer memories of the water-skiers at Cypress Gardens, and I'm sure we stopped at at least a couple of other attractions that have faded from memory.

Now that I try to pull up memories, it's interesting how much has faded and what still stands out. Somewhere I convinced my parents to pay for a drawing done by a sidewalk artist, who made my shirt blue instead of the white it really was, and that portrait hung in my parents' bedroom for many years afterward. We ate at Morrison's Roast Beef almost every day--an all-you-can-eat cafeteria-style chain where I fell in love with the hot open roast beef sandwiches. I tried Key Lime pie for the first time and still don't care for it. It was incredibly hot for much of the trip, especially while we were in Orlando--there are pictures of six-year old me with sweat standing out on my brow, and I think that trip is what convinced my Dad to start getting air conditioning in our future cars. I remember the orange briefcase, handed down from my father, that held my books, toys, and drawing materials. I remember singing show tunes and Scottish airs and rounds along the highway. I remember sleeping on Beckie, who was incredibly patient for a fifteen year old dragged along on a six-year-old's dream trip.

As I think about it, that's why I'm picking that trip: it was the first time that a trip focused on what I would enjoy, not on visiting family, or attending a meeting, or entertaining a church group, or--as would soon become the case--visiting colleges. My parents wanted me to love travelling as much as they did and I can see now the effort and expense they went to in order to teach me the joy of it. That was a good trip.

gilana gave me an awesome gift! For a year, StoryWorth will send me writing prompts and at the end of the year turn the stories I write into a keepsake book. I've decided to also share them here--I'll use the tag "storyworth" to keep them together--so we can all hope for more regular posting from me. Gilly says she loves my stories and I'm excited to be encouraged to do more writing and maybe even to tell some new ones, though many of them may be familiar. Enjoy!

How did you choose your children's names?

When I was little someone—probably one of my sisters—told me that if I had been a boy, I would have been named Alexander after one of my mother’s uncles and, I later discovered, one of my first ancestors to come to America from Scotland. When I asked my mother why she hadn’t named me Alexandra, a name I think would have suited me very well, she would only say “Tsk! That’s no name for a girl baby.” An inveterate rebel, I decided immediately that when I had a girl I would definitely name her Alexandra.

When I finally became pregnant and we started talking about names I still thought that I would choose Alexandra. But after a visit to my husband’s Great-Uncle Jack and his wife, Alice, I began thinking that might be an even better choice.

Jack and Alice were a wonderful couple. Married for more than fifty years when I met them, they were still clearly in love—he was her cowboy and she was his princess. They were old-fashioned Broadway folk—Jack played Benedict in the first professional New York production of Much Ado About Nothing, staged in Central Park by Joe Papp years before the construction of the Delacorte Theater, and he had a successful career in theatre, film, and television and a suprise post-retirement gig as the voice of Subaru. Great-Aunt Alice loved to tell stories of the more famous actors and directors Jack worked with—George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, James Earl Jones, Anthony Hopkins, Angela Lansbury, and so many more.

They never had any children and I thought that naming our child for her would be a way of letting Great-Aunt Alice know that she would be remembered and treasured as part of our family. It also satisfied my mother’s naming advice, “No more than five letters, no more than two syllables,” which she never followed and perhaps contributed to none of her children using our given names. Alice was only the 400th most popular girl name the year before our daughter was born, but one that we thought most people would recognize, thanks to Lewis Carroll. We liked the resonance with Alice in Wonderland, Alice B. Toklas, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and other famous Alices.

When I mentioned to our parents that we were thinking of “Alice,” each of our fathers said “Oh, after my grandmother,” and we said yes, of course. Even though that wasn’t the original motivation, it was good to know that this was a name that would connect our daughter with both sides of her family.

We had a couple of other options—Julianne and Claire—that each have their own stories and, amusingly, were chosen for the daughters of two of my ex-boyfriends who were born the same month as ours. But Alice was always the front-runner and as soon as she was laid on my chest I knew that was the right name for our kid.

Before we filled out the birth certificate we called Great-Aunt Alice to ask her blessing. She laughed and, I think, cried just a little, and told us that we didn’t have to do that. We told her that we wanted to and then she admitted that she had always rather hated her name—it sounded so old-fashioned to her. I suggested that she didn’t have a marvelous aunt to be reminded of when she heard it. We took our Alice to visit her great-great-aunt early and often before her death in 2016 and they always had a great deal of sympathy and fondness for each other. We try to pass on some of Great-Aunt Alice’s wonderful stories and remind our Alice often of her beautiful home overlooking the Hudson River.

Our Alice enjoys her name, even though it has gained in popularity, breaking into the Top 100 a year after she was born. There are a couple of other Alices at school, but never one in the same class. The biggest problem is that so many people mistakenly hear “Alex” and think her name must be Alexandra.

As I believe I've mentioned, Jason's mother died in early June. A lovely obituary for her is available here. We went out to Idaho in July for the family reunion she'd helped to plan, which became a chance for her family to mourn her together.

Jason's dad, Steve, decided that the memorial event in Seattle would be a gathering in their garden this past Saturday, so we flew out on Wednesday night. We spent Thursday puttering around and Friday mostly working in the garden--one of Trish's gardening friends came over to get us started and point out what needed doing. I was rather amazed at myself for doing that much yard work, but it was oddly satisfying and felt like a real way of honoring Trish's memory.

On Saturday people packed into their beautiful garden. There were co-workers of Steve, people from the neighborhood, friends from the book club she founded more than thirty years ago and members of the chamber choir she had joined more than forty years ago, and about twenty members of her extended family--all her siblings, a couple of their kids, three of her first cousins, plus their assorted partners. Everyone expressed their shock at her sudden passing and told stories of her generosity in their lives. One of her friends brought the sheet music for Wild Mountain Thyme and Jason's brother, Eric, accompanied us on his violin as we sang "Will ye go, lassie, go" in the lovely Seattle afternoon in the shade of the trees Trish had planted.

It was a beautiful farewell to a life full of friends and family, music, literature, and love.

Lately, Sundays have become especially busy. If I only have two or three events on my calendar for a Sunday, that's a pretty easy-going day--sometimes there are five. Perhaps because of that, today felt only moderately busy.

I was surprised to find, as Easter approached, that I was thinking of my mother more than usual. It felt so strange to be planning for the day without figuring out how to include her. Perhaps it's because for her it was still a very religious holiday, or just because I have so many memories, so many pictures of us all gathered in the sunshine in our Sunday best, with her tucked between her giant girls.

This year I actually wondered if we had to celebrate Easter as a family. And then I thought sure, keeping the tradition of getting the family together a few times a year is no bad thing. I wondered if I might turn to my sisters and ask what plan they might come up with that didn't involve my house, or me cooking. And I thought about hiring a chef, which I've done a few times, or going to a restaurant. But in the end I decided that I did want to cook and to gather family and friends around the table.

The day started early, getting to First Parish by 8am so we would have time to eat breakfast there and practice our skit before the choir gathered at 8:30. Jo and I were performing a piece based on The Yellow Tutu, with narration by our fabulous DRE and some mean-girl assistance from members of the choir. It was short and sweet and involved the indelible image of the two of us dancing in front of the congregation wearing tutus on our heads.

Our minister had asked us to wear silly hats and I'd decided to get this blue fascinator, which was an utter hoot to wear. The adult and children's choirs collaborated on "Easter Bonnet" and we sang lots of joyful hymns. We also did a responsive reading that I found really moving, adapted from a sermon by Nadia Bolz-Weber:

( Some Modern Beatitudes )

During her invocation for communion, Marta also gave us a chance to speak the names of the dead who were in our thoughts today and I was so grateful for the chance to say my mother's name, to invoke the presence that has been hovering over me this week.

Alice had a grand time in the Easter Egg Hunt--her first year in the graveyard with the big kids. We stayed for the first part of the second service, in which Alice was one of the readers, while Jason and I reprised our performances, and then snuck out. The car said it was 82F as we pulled out and I was dreading turning on the oven for dinner. But while I took a nap, Jason turned on the AC and it was actually pleasant inside throughout the day. Alice found her Easter basket and seemed to enjoy the various treats and toys I'd included in it.

While Jason de-cluttered and got the dining room set for dinner, I roasted the lamb that had been marinating since yesterday, on top of potatoes, onions, mushrooms and garlic, which I seved with a very tasty demi-glace. I made way too many deviled eggs, with the help of Lisa, Paulo, and George at various points. Beckie & Neil brought the traditional too-much-nosh (shrimps and cheeses and summer sausage and pate and olives, oh my!). Anne & G. brought Greek-style braised green beans and I made a chopped Greek salad and heated up some Hawaiian rolls that miraculously survived several months in the freezer to be wonderfully soft and tasty. Dave and Jo collaborated to decorate the spiced carrot chiffon cake I had made yesterday with honey-cream cheese ice cream and pecans. By the time Hatem got out of work and could join us, we were just about ready to put it all on the table.

The food was reasonably good (not the best I've ever managed, but no one complained) and it seemed like an especially good group of people and conversations. Jo and Beckie helped enormously with the clean-up and by the time everyone had left around 5:30, another half hour got the kitchen to a state where I felt I could leave it. So I took another short nap, rising in time to be awake when the Mourning Becomes Electra arrived for a line-thru of the whole show.

I was able to do the whole thing without my script, though I did get confused and have to call "line" a couple of times. I felt pretty good about it and most other people are also in pretty good shape. This is going to be a really powerful show and there are a lot of dark moments, but we had fun together and it was really nice to be in a room with most of the cast, since that hasn't happened much yet. Jason got Alice to bed during one of the stretches when he's not on stage, but I was able to pop up and kiss her goodnight.

The cast and crew took off and after a break, it was time to finish up the kitchen and get the garbage, recycling, and compost to the curb. And now, I think I can say that I am well and truly done. I'm very excited that Alice doesn't have school in the morning.

gilana has taken the slideshow I made for the memorial service and turned it into a YouTube video. Thank you, Gilly!

We had a relatively small gathering this year, but that meant that we were able to all fit around the table.

( Food Notes Behind the Cut )

All-in-all, this meal didn't thrill me like Christmas dinner did, but it was a lovely day and nice to sit around the table with all the windows open and the breezes carrying away the heat of the oven. Huge props to jason237 for all his assistance and to muffyjo for pitching in to help out in so many ways.

I've been making Christmas dinner for my family regularly--not every year, but many--since 1991. I usually make roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. This year somehow it all came out and came together better than ever before, so I thought I should write it down while it's still fresh in my mind.

( Read more... )

We were all sad that bex77 and audioboy couldn't be with us and Dad had a bad spell this afternoon that threatened to make him miss dinner, as well. But he rallied and it was really nice to gather around the table for some family time at Christmas.

I hope you've all had a wonderful day!