You know it wasn’t our turn to design the game this year, but circumstances being what they were, what choice did we have? My sister-in-law, who was supposed to be the architect for 2016, was scheduled to give birth less than 2 weeks before the event, and so wouldn’t even be able to attend, much […]
Category Archives: Christmas Eve
The 2015 Christmas Eve Scavenger Hunt (CESH), and What Came After
Every year, my wife’s family spends Christmas Eve together, eating cookies, drinking tea and hot chocolate, opening gifts, singing carols, and running around the downtown area publicly humiliating themselves. So basically just your normal holiday traditions. We rotate the responsibilities of designing and constructing the epic photo/video scavenger hunt each year, and this time it […]
Things Just Got a Little More Epic – CESH 2014
Four years ago we modified a long-standing family tradition in an effort to include the younger children and spice things up a bit. Instead of the annual shop-n-swap, in which each family member would go off and buy a small gift for each other player (with time and dollar limits), we changed it into a […]
It’s the Third Most Wonderful Day of the Year!
Ruby is very excited. She, like me, is not a morning person, and yet she woke up long before anyone else today. Edward, our human alarm clock, is still sleeping (probably because he was up at 2, trying to climb into Ruby’s bed in the hopes that this mid-night act would cause Santa to arrive […]
Do NOT Do Your Christmas Shopping Early
It sounds like a great idea. Do your Christmas shopping early, so the costs are spread out over time, and you are not rushing around on Christmas Eve looking for last minute gifts. It is like a beautiful package of common sense, wrapped up in a ribbon of duh. And yet in practice, it is […]
Juggling December
As you may recall, I recently whined and complained about the fact that December was the month for both auditions and concerts. What I failed to mention at that time was the fact that it is also the month for extra things going on at church, as well as make-up voice lessons for students who […]
Christmas Hangover
Man, that was a lot of Christmas! There is only so much joy and frivolity that one can take, and I am wiped out! The 26th should be a national holiday as well: a day of recovery. See, New Year’s Day is nice, because everyone does their celebrating the night before, and then you get […]
The Christmas Story is Our Story
Today is Christmas Eve, and millions of us are preparing to celebrate that most wonderful of days, some of us having no idea why or what it is truly all about. Why is this story so popular, and why has it captivated us for all of these centuries? The truth is, the Christmas story may […]
The First Annual Christmas Eve Scavenger Hunt
This year, we started a new tradition with my wife’s family. In past years we had played a Shop and Swap Christmas Game on Christmas Eve, where everyone goes somewhere, splits up, and buys a little gift (under $5) for every other player. At the end, we would go home for lunch, wrap the presents, […]