Christmas Eve

As we sat down for Christmas dinner tonight, people squeezing in around the too-small table, my aunt Susan said to me, in front of everybody, "Rachel, I need to tell you that you have the most infectious laugh."

I think I looked stunned, because she continued, "Whenever you laugh, it makes me want to start laughing too. I bet nobody ever tells you that, and it's important that you hear it."

Which is true. They don't, and it's the nicest thing anybody has told me in a while.

I spent the evening leading up to dinner playing with my little cousins. C and I went with them to the park and took lots of pictures, I with my digital camera, and C with the black and white film in my SLR camera. We had the black and white pictures developed at the one-hour processing place, and they came out beautifully, cementing my belief that my little cousins are the cutest little cousins ever.

My cousins have been completing puzzles all week on a card table at my grandmother's house. These are complicated puzzles, mind you, with repeating patterns and irregular borders and 1000 pieces. As they were finishing the last puzzle, C and I went to the madness that is Toys 'R Us on Christmas Eve to find more puzzles for the girls to work on while they're in Corpus Christi.

It was insane. The place was packed with people buying last-minute Christmas presents for their kids. It was Barbie and Disney and bicycles as far as the eye could see, and the shelves were rather bare, as though all the Christmas cheer had been combed out of them.

The people standing in line, many of whom looked like young parents who could ill afford the presents piled in their shopping baskets, were all weary and frazzled. In the aisle next to us, a couple purchased some wicker doll furniture and a number of other items, most notably a Barbie bicycle. They peeled off bills with a grimace as they paid the final total, well over $200, and I imagined how hard it must be to have young kids at Christmastime and felt very thankful not to be in that position.