The Burns Family: Christmas, Round 5

I so badly wanted to put in a clip art photo of a little girl opening a Christmas present in that previous post to represent Kate, but it wouldn't let me download the image. Does anyone out there know how to do that?

I think the main reason I am recording the Christmas madness is so that come Christmas 2009 I can recall exactly who we spent time with and when and where (and what we gave others so I won't give them the same thing again). Christmas Day evening we went to my parents house for 'the big deal', which consists of dinner, gift opening one-by-one, dessert, more gift opening, and if there is time, games. This year we ate traditional Christmas food: ham, turkey, and casseroles of every sort. My mom makes these amazing sweet potato biscuits, mmmmmmmMM. That's right. They are so good. My cousin Carole and her husband Matt scored major points with a Hello Kitty tent and Light Brite (or Light Brighter, as Kate calls it) for the girls. I think I am going to shop more like her from now on - get for them what I would have wanted if I were still a kid. I did have a Light Brite and Hello Kitty tent when I was a kid, I think.

And we did end up having time for a game, which was loads of fun. We learned it from our friends Sean and Stacey Weiland at our small group Christmas party. Everyone writes down something about themselves that most of the others would not know, eg: "I once carried the Olympic Torch". Put the card in a hat, mix them up, and as one person reads them aloud and numbers them, the others guess who the card belongs to. My mom won with 8 out of 15 the first round, which was impressive. And I found out my dad was once in a middle school choir competition. I didn't know they had whistlers in choirs. I also learned it was Alice who touched the Olympic Torch while a student at Clemson, my brother broke his pinky toe on a diving board, Aunt Nancy played field hockey all 4 years in high school, when my grandmother Monie was a little girl she hid costume jewelry in a jar and buried in her yard in Landrum, and my cousin Carole, because of a dream that was so vividly real, only recently discovered that, in fact, Kevin Bacon is not a distant relative.