Christmas Bug

We have a family tradition around here on Christmas. Every year, at least one member of the family must be sick, sick, sick. On especially good years, we are all sick, like the year my ailing wheelchair-bound grandparents came to visit, and the entire family came down with the stomach flu. We had six very sick people, and only three toilets. Fun times.

This year, it was my turn to catch the Christmas bug. The day before my sister and her family arrived, I came down with a horrendous head cold. The bonus of being pregnant with a nasty stuffy head is that anything that even barely touches your gag reflex (like the stuff draining out of your head) makes you very sick, in an unmerry, Scrooge-riffic way.

We've done all the traditional Christmas things - we made a Yule Log and had a huge Christmas Eve feast of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and more green bean casserole than you can imagine. (I prepared the food, but couldn't really taste it. No sense of smell = no sense of taste.) We attended a candlelight Christmas Eve service where I couldn't smell the melting wax of the candles. We had an extravagant Christmas morning brunch and opened stockings and gifts for something like 4 hours straight.

We have gone snow tubing, ice skating, bowling, Christmas lights looking, to museums, national parks and the ever-popular Ikea.

It has been a very, very good time. But I wish this Christmas cold would vanish before 2007 shows up.