If you are looking for a tale of seasonal excitement, this isn’t it. If, instead, you are interested in a bland summary of a Christmas come slowly, read on.
Due to the pressures of my last master’s semester and the intenseness of Jason’s work schedule, Christmas was in no hurry to embrace us with its spirit or sparkle this year. We didn’t finish putting the ornaments on our tree or hanging the stockings by our chimney with slight care until just a few days before Christmas. Presents didn’t begin accumulating under our ever-plastic Tannenbaum until even later. This isn’t standard Rachel M.O. Rachel M.O. involves planning precisely, one could say anally, well in advance. Some aspects of our holiday, however, fit our norm all too well.
With a little help from Jason, I made 19 customized statements of affirmation for many of my family members. This was one of the projects that kept us up and intensely occupied.
It’s a Rachel habit to enter a neurotic cleaning mode right before Christmas, but that didn’t happen this year. While the neurotic nature of our traditional Christmas Eve was maintained, it wasn’t spurred by housework. We stayed up to 4 AM working on gift projects and wrapping presents.
College friends we hadn’t seen in a decade visited during the holidays.
Also true to tradition, we didn’t start opening our presents to each other until almost midnight on Christmas evening. Even our stockings didn’t get perused until late in the day. This was mostly due to the demands of those same gift projects. Somehow, we did fit in a little time for some fancy cooking though, a favorite holiday pastime of mine, but not as much as my stomach would have liked.
This year, Christmas arrived like a sneaky ninja, a sneaky ninja with a bullwhip. Once it crept in, it kept us too overworked to unwind. Yes, it is possible that I am incapable of relaxing, holiday whip-bearing ninjas or not, but there’s no point pondering that enigma as it will never be resolved.
Jason and I have been throwing a Christmas party every December for nearly two decades. While we keep this event small because our sanity is only marginal after our Halloween bash, that doesn’t mean it is a calm and dignified affair. This year, it proceeded in a “regular” fashion, meaning all kinds of rowdy. Allow me to share a few of the highlights:
Our meal consisted of barbecued meats and sides from R&R (my favorite place to get brisket), a massive salad from Café Zupas, and a selection of sweets from Corner Bakery Café.
Cameron didn’t just wear an ugly sweater to our party, he wore an ugly women’s sweater.
I again took humorous, and purposefully cheesy, holiday pictures of all attendees that wanted them. This time, however, I limited the shooting to just half an hour, so I could still dance and prance with the rest of the ungainly reindeer. You’d be amazed how many horrible pictures you can take in 30 minutes.
Jason and I prefer ugly sweaters with nerdy flair.
Rowley removed his tawdry reindeer onesie to reveal another kind of hoofed monstrosity, a reindeer mankini. (Thankfully, that wasn’t quite all he was wearing.) You will just have to imagine, or try not to imagine, this outfit. I didn’t want to be responsible for any PTSD, so pictures of this particular ensemble have been omitted here.
Just Dance is outlandish enough to mesh nicely with our party’s vibe.
The white elephant gifts ranged from hugely-sized Rice Krispies treats to fat “dad” bags. White elephants sure are unpredictable creatures.
In taking pictures of the partiers, I didn’t hold back on the seasonal cheese- as the indoor snowflakes attest.
Half the partiers stayed until the bitter end playing Codenames. So, we had plenty of help carting crap out to our car in a hurriedly fashion a few minutes before midnight.
The white elephant exchange is the only element of our party that we’ve never changed.
As anticipated, our Christmas gathering was a rather irreverent but relaxed affair. Between ugly sweaters, even uglier moustaches, and truly hideous mankinis, its foulness lightheartedly touched the holidays just right. Thanks friends for joining us yet again for this comical Christmas tradition.
It has been months since our halls boomed with the incantations of witches, but the late arrival of a post on the subject is fitting because Jason and I were slower eradicating Halloween this year than ever before. Usually, our crows and maggots are stored away prior to Christmas, but it’s February, and they were only just barely caged. Yes, this year, much more than others, our party experienced some lags.
This year, Jason and I dressed as Victorian circus performers. I was Marvelous Mabel, Tightrope Walker Extraordinaire, and Jason was Leopold Leotard the Great.
Knowing we would be in Europe for half of October, Jason and I wisely started our party preparations extra early. Then, in a momentarily lapse into idiocy, we decided to transform our basement into a wizarding world, a process that required new props and the imaginative rethinking of space. Why this year of all years? Floating candles don’t just float themselves into existence. (Do I need to roll for a sanity check?) Thankfully, we had some transformation help. Over the years, decorating for our event has almost become an event in of itself. On an evening or Saturday afternoon, friends gather and catch up over pizza and creepy scene setters. The conversations are lively, and the assistance is enlivening. This year, Adam even popped in from Washington to put up a few cobwebs; bedecking our spooky halls is that thrilling. Thanks Lee, Drew, Simone, Jacob, Rowley, Adam, and Keith for lending us some of your mystical brainpower and pushpin skills!
Constructing floating candles out of toilet-paper, paper-towel, and wrapping-paper tubes sounds like a short task- it wasn’t.
Jason and I attempted to recreate Hogwarts’ charmed ceiling by painting a long strip of gossamer.
Beyond the hefty task of decorating, fashioning the favors for our party always represent a different type of challenge. Trying to guess the correct combination of adult, teenager, and kid gifts needed is difficult. So, this year, Jason and I opted to give our guests plenty of options from which to pick what they favored, with some appealing to multiple age groups. We assembled 36 kid bags, 12 wizard wands, 24 gothic toiletries, and 20 tween grabs.
The adult favors this year were gothic toiletries from The Bubbling Cauldron, which I dressed up in black.
It was Jason’s brilliant idea to tie the tween bags with rope nooses.
Jason and I arrived home from Europe only days before our get-together. We had pretty severe jet lag the night of our party, so we almost nodded off while tallying the costume contest votes. It’s kind of comical having 85 guests in your house while you can barely stay awake.
We created a selfie spot for Azkaban’s most wanted.
Professional photos are available at our event, so attendees can capture their magnificent costumes.
Not everything was more complicated this year though. Dinky Donuts took some of the common headaches out of catering for us. Their desserts were hot, fresh, and yummy. Better yet, this food truck arrived on time and was ready to handle orders precisely when anticipated. Yeah! That’s a first for our food-truck luck.
The Bingo table is always packed with players.
The preferred craft this year was customizable Harry-Potter-themed potion necklaces- a Rachel original.
Cleaning up the piles of cups and sticky crumbs after our shindig also went much quicker than normal thanks to some kind helpers. Benson, Rowley, Milo, Drew, and Simone all pitched in. You know you’ve mastered the universe when He-Man vacuums your house for you.
We added shelves to a wall and topped them with all the makings of great magic.
Throwing our annual Halloween party is always exhausting, throwing it while experiencing jet lag was almost laughable. A big thank you to the assistants that graciously lent a hand or wand; you are more enchanting than a Scourgify spell. And a thank you to our friends and family that have made this shindig a fall ritual; it wouldn’t be a 17-year-and-still-running tradition without you.
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