This falls into the category of “looking for something else, I found this”. Looking for what? I wasn’t really sure. December-type images, I guess.

It’s my dad sitting next to the Dillon Street faaaaaplace. My brother’s dog Sam is next to him and my brother’s wife is to the left of the dog. Behind her is the door to the Dillon House kitchen. The pic was taken on December 27, 2001. We must have traveled up there after xmas that year since we NEVER actually spent xmas day there.

Except once. When Lizard Breath was two months old I so wanted to take my infant up to spend xmas with her grandparents and various other relatives. Okay. Freezing rain on the way up so bad we actually got a motel room halfway up. Rain and freezing rain the whole week we were there to the point where it was hard to walk anywhere. Freezing rain on the way back home. The baby was crying in the back seat of our little Ford Fiesta. It was too dangerous to take her out of her car seat, which I have been known to do, so I reached back there and grabbed her feet. That settled her down for a while but the last half hour of the trip was dicey.

I swore right then and there that I would never make a plan to travel to the yooperland specifically *for* xmas again. I only got two weeks of vacation time back then and I would save it for summer. That’s not to say that we never went there during the holiday season again, just that we always spent xmas eve and day in our own house on The Planet Ann Arbor, creating our own holiday “traditions”, willy-nilly as they were (and still are).

The xmas in the pic, that tiny infant was in her senior year of high school. Her granddaddy lasted another five years. My brother (his son) left us nine months before he died.

Not to leave this on a sad note. I am still feeling some random holiday grumpiness but I took the afternoon off, the last four hours of my use-or-lose paid time off for 2024. I can’t say I got a whole lot done this afternoon but I was able to think ahead a bit about menu planning, which opened up some head space.

P.S. On the long-ago trip up north with the infant, when we FINALLY arrived, The Commander (her grandmother) was sitting in a chair next to the front door. I put the baby in her lap and… The baby, who hadn’t seen her grandmother in six weeks, looked up and immediately broke out in a HUGE smile! Did she remember her grandmother? Who knows.

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