Happy Christmas to All

Our Christmas Eve was nice, just hanging out with family. Howie and I went to my folks' home for goodies and coffee (and a gift exchange, hee hee) and we fiddled with mom's laptop until it was again able to connect to the web. Weirdest thing...The quickstart menu's shortcut to her dial-up was trying to open her USB smartmedia card reader. Who knows how that happened. When we tried going to the networking window and clicking on the original dial-up networking icon, it still tried opening the smartmedia reader...Even though looking at the dial-up connection's properties showed everything as usual. Howie deleted that connection and made a new one, problem solved.

But I digress...It was a nice time with family tonight. We had our gift exchange and then drove over to my MIL's home together. Everyone wasn't able to be there tonight, but we still all had a nice visit. My nephew Luke and I played a game of Scrabble on the Travel Scrabble Game Folio, which Howie got from mom and dad. That is the coolest little thing! We have the original Deluxe Travel Scrabble in the hard plastic case, but we were always frustrated when we wanted to put a game aside for a while. This new version solves that problem with these nifty little snap-in letters. They even snap into the letter trays. Best yet, you can also snap the full trays in their spots, fold the game back up and zip the portfolio closed until you're ready to finish your game. Very, very cool. :)

We packed into the car and drove around a bit looking at lights before heading to our church's 11:00pm Christmas Eve service. It was nice seeing folks and singing those familiar songs together, just remembering why we celebrate all of this hoopla. Our pastor spoke about the legend that "The Twelve Days of Christmas" were really a means for the persecuted church to learn the catechism. It's a nice thought, but from what I've read, it's just not true. At some point, someone probably made the parallels between the song's lyrics and items from the Christian faith, but I don't think it was ever used in such a manner originally. Still, it made for an interesting sermon and we sang a different version of the song afterwards, substituting the various "hidden meanings" for the traditional ones.