Christmas Week in Boston, 2016

We spent Christmas and Christmas week in Boston this year, not traveling until New Year's Eve. The week before Christmas, we got some slushy snow that melted within a day, leaving us with a decidedly not white Christmas. Meanwhile, I hung up the Christmas cards as we got them, on our door to our screened-in porch, making the house festive. And Samantha performed "O Candy Cane" ("how minty and delightful") and "The Reindeer Pokey" in the school holiday show.

By the time the first vacation day arrived, on Friday the 23rd, we were all in the holiday spirit. We went to the main library for a detective/scavenger hunt/code-breaking hour of activities, and also to just read books, play, and use their dress-up pile. Afterwards, Robert took the kids for celebratory hot chocolates at the Capital One Cafe.

That night, Robert and Marcus and Pop-pop went to get our Christmas tree, which, as part of a complicated arrangement thanks to a school parent who owns a tree farm in Vermont, was a fundraiser for the orchestra and was being stored in the yard of someone's house near Dudley Square.

It was a lovely tree when they finally got it home and up! Amanda, her cousin Mitch, and not-such-a-baby Katy arrived that night, and Marcus helped them trim the tree while Samantha snoozed. We saved a few special ornaments for Samantha to put on the next morning.

On Christmas Eve morning, we had cinnamon buns and breakfast tacos and opened presents on the couch.

Then the kids made long paper chains to decorate the house, and Marcus worked on his solar-powered robot Christmas present

We took the subway to Chinatown for a feast of soup dumplings and all sorts of other delicious Chinese dishes, and then came back for the little girls to make a gingerbread house before Amanda and Mitch had to leave to pick up another cousin of hers from the airport and drive to her aunt's house. It was a great Christmas Eve!

Christmas Day, we had Bob, Grandma and Pop-pop, and Aunt Mary over for dinner, and we all had another lovely day together. We were so happy to have Aunt Mary visit our house (she made it up the stairs with difficulty, but got up, and went down positively easily!) and after they had gone home to rest from all the exertion, we played a board game and ate cookies with Bob until almost 9:00.

On Boxing Day, we met a classmate of Samantha's, Lou, and her mother and little sister at the MFA for a family art day. Everyone had a great time looking at the O'Keefes, making clay creations, and painting winter scenes a la Monet. Pop-pop accompanied us, and we had a fun lunch of poutine and sandwiches at Grub on Huntington afterward.

The next day, Robert went back to work, but we met him for a Greek lunch downtown, eating picnic-style outside because it was so mild, before heading to the aquarium for some sea animals and fun.

We stayed busy the rest of the week with some other Christmas presents, including (here shown in its very earliest stages of construction) some nanoblocks of the Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona.

 

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Created: 1/18/17. Last Modified: 1/18/17.