Happy New Year, everyone!

I have two songs on my Christmas playlist that express opposite sentiments about looking back at the year that’s coming to a close. Reliant K’s “Boxing Day” tells us, “we’ve had a good year; now let’s have another,” while Queen muses in “Thank God it’s Christmas,” “Oh my friends, it’s been a long hard year” and later, “we live in troubled days.”

I can get behind both of those sentiments as we look forward to 2019.

I have no idea, of course, what 2019 will be like, but it’s bound to be one with a whole lot of changes, as Ari is likely to head off to college (he still has the idea of a gap year in his head, but I suspect once he knows where he’s going he’ll want to go ahead and get started).

But I don’t want to think about that anymore right now, so how about a quick Christmas recap before I move on to the post wherein I look back at house related plans from 2018 and set some goal-like things for 2019?

Every year Dave takes a video of the kids coming downstairs on Christmas morning, and every year that video gets filed away somewhere on my computer never to be seen again. Get videos organized! Should be one of my goals for 2019. The animals are wondering why we’re getting up when it’s still dark out:

Santa left a note, and this year Abe could read it himself!

Last year we surprised the kids with (the promise of) chicks, and it’s a bit hard to beat that. Unless you can get them a puppy, but we have three dogs already, so we couldn’t.

But Santa did bring Abe a drum set, which is way louder than baby chicks:

This guy: it was HIS fault (I just wanted to show off this year’s Santa pic; thanks to Blencoe&Co Photography!):

Big kids are hard to shop for. But I found this Abbey Road take off beagles shirt for Milo, and it’s the best shirt ever:

Gus is fairly newly into drawing, so he got a lot of art supplies:

I bought Ari (and me) an AMC Stubs A-list subscription thing (you can see up to 3 movies a week for $20/month), because I intend to do lots of bonding over film with him before he leaves home. Then I can move on to the next kid, because you have to be 16 to get it. So far we’ve seen Mary Poppins Returns (all of us saw that one, actually), Aquaman, and Bumblebee. Did you know that all the movies now are about superheroes? True story.

The nerf guns were for Abe, but everyone got in on the battle:

Nana and Grandpa got Abe a jersey from his second favorite baseball player (Acuña, Jr. was sold out):

We attempted a picture in front of the tree:

And we got to spend time with lots of different friends and family between Christmas and Christmas Eve. My brother played the ukulele:

And the kids put on a performance of the play Ari and Abe have been writing together, “Christmas in South Carolina.” I need to make them do it again so I can record it.

Another lovely Christmas in the books. Christmas is my favorite. We were supposed to go to New Orleans after Christmas, but we ended up canceling the trip because the weather forecast was so miserable, and we had a great staycation at home, doing lots of local stuff instead.

Okay! Back to house stuff next! I have a lot of house stuff to talk about! Well, I mean, relatively speaking.