Christmas Eve & Day 2010 - NJ

Well, Christmas 2010 is done. We're starting to pack things away and make room for all the new stuff. Let me correct that statement: I am starting to pack things away. Matt's still asleep, as well he should be. We both had a very busy holiday season and he did a lot of work on food.

We spent Christmas eve and day at Matt's sister's house. Christmas Eve was the traditional feast of the seven fishes, which went off without a hitch. Matt blames it on my help, but I don't know that I did all that much. He said it would have been a race to the "finish line" without me and my support. Again, don't know how I helped that much, but I guess I kept him going at times. Christmas day was fun. Matt and I had our gift exchange at home.

Our Yule Log:


Then we went traipsing up to Mahwah again (about 30 minutes up north) to spend the day with his sister's family and his aunt and cousin. It was fun and the kids were soooo excited. The day ended with his aunt and nephew getting a stomach bug from something. Not sure what cuz we all ate the same things. Hmmm...

I got Matt a peacoat, two jackets, an audio book (David Sedaris), and a leather executive office chair that matches mine. He got me/us a whole bunch of geeky things for the Xbox and our diet plan for 2011. I'm really glad he got us those things cuz I really didn't need anything at all!

Matt's Leather Executive Chair (I'd already purchased it and he was already using it, but I had to wrap a gift with it, you know?)


The NJ Christmastime was fun and pretty easy. Here's our geekwares:

Boxing Day & Post Christmas 2010 - NJ, NY, NC, VA, MD, DC, DE - OY VEY!!

Boxing Day 2010. Day started at 3:30 AM checking on our flight to NC. Flight's still on time for departure at 6AM. Cab comes at 4:15AM to cart us to LaGuardia and we had carry-on luggage. In NY, they were asking for two people who were willing to give up their seats for a $300 voucher apiece. We almost opted for that, but realized we might not get into Raleigh if we did that. We gave up $600 of airfare in order to make it to the Lambeth Christmas gathering!

We flew to NC from LaGuardia Airport (NY) The entire flight to NC, we saw only white outside our window. Typically, as we're landing at RDU, you can see miles of trees and green and neighborhoods. That day, this is what we saw:




Once we landed in Raleigh on the "plowed" runway, we got to our gate about 5 minutes later, while another plane was getting deiced (above). This is the video I took of our smooth landing out my window:

Inside the airport before we got our coffee, we looked at the board (top left). Our later reshuffled flight with $600 of vouchers would totally have been canceled. We wouldn't have made it to NC at all!


Our Alamo car was waiting for us and we had "pick of the litter" from about 4 cars. For some stupid reason, I picked the Dodge Charger (rear-wheel drive) instead of any Toyota or Honda (front-wheel drive). None of the cars available had all-weather tires anyway, but it would have been smarter to get a front-wheel drive for the snow. We were tired and it was 8:30AM, after 4 hours of sleep.

This is the car - pretty and red, huh? It looks really good in the snow.

Unfortunately, for this trip, "looks good in the snow" meant "lodged in a ditch on the side of some arbitrary road in south Raleigh"!! That's where I landed us, thinking I was turning into a driveway that ended up being a massive, deep ditch. I couldn't see the front of the hood at first because of the snow drift.



Asshole rednecks in the neighborhood walked by us without stopping to help or asking if we needed help - even after I beeped! One angelic good ol' boy stopped to try to get us out to no avail, so we called AAA. 3 minutes later, Matt jostled us out of the hole and back onto the road. AAA was looking for us within about 5 minutes!!! We passed the tow truck on the way to the hotel while we were canceling the call and told them thanks for getting there so quickly. Hopefully, they got out to help the 30+ abandoned cars we passed on the highways from the airport.

Our hotel room was pretty and the beds were really comfortable! We took a nice 2.5-hour nap before heading to my youngest sister's house for lunch, games, dinner, and games.


We made it to my sister's house and it was a beautiful wintry wonderland!! We spent two and a half days going back and forth from our hotel to my sister's house for family festivities. In the end, we all had a great time (mixing in some dramatic moments where family members lost their holiday cool). Got some really fun gifts and had lots of good food and laughs.

Not to be taken lightly though, the weather and air traffic didn't cooperate with us. Our flight on Tuesday to return to LGA was canceled and we're getting a refund from our trip. Alamo, the car rental place who gave us the Dodge Charger (feh), wanted to charge us $450 on top of a day's rental ($120) to drive up to NJ; i.e. $570!! We switched to Budget instead and got a nice Malibu for the trip for a mere $248 total with an XM/Sirius radio to boot! The trip was quite uneventful, thankfully, and the main roads were completely clear. We ordered a cab to pick us up from the airport and drive us home from Budget at Newark airport - YAY - and got home at about 2AM. We are exhausted and really glad to be home!!

Here are some pictures of the snow and the holidays with my family: