Juxtapose

In VA for the holidays, with 65 degree weather (warmer than the inside of our apartment, generally), hash brown casseroles, jello salad molds, and lots of tea. It's been wonderful. And if I don't reach the ten pound weight gain mark that I'm supposed to hit by twenty weeks along by the end of this trip, I don't know what in the world will make me gain weight.

I've had fun giggling at the Super Christian vibe down here, as well as the way every house here seems to be decorated with holly berries, wreaths, and excessive lights. For someplace so warm and lacking in snow, it looks like a winter wonderland straight out of the North Pole. The decorations on the houses of New Englanders don't even compare to the lengths that have been reached by desperate southerners praying for a small Christmas flurry to miraculously appear despite sunny skies: wreaths, fake green garlands draped everywhere, blow-up Santas in every yard, and icicle lights hanging from dry-as-a-bone gutters. You can tell, up north, that New England is already sick of the three feet of snow they've gotten while we've been down here simply by comparing their one feeble wreath on the door of the house to these houses down here.

Of course I love being a part of the family most of all. Christmas day was spent with the Van Der Hydes on the farm, with forty people crammed into the kitchen, waiting to go around the table to get food. Shortly after grace was said, and about four feet from where I was standing, a metal beam in the basement had slowly rusted out on the bottom and gave way, dropping the floor about two inches and producing a bang and shudder that sounded and felt like someone had either hit the house with a car or the floor would completely cave in. You just wish something that exciting happened at *your* Christmas party. After that, we ate and sat watching the little kids open presents in a living room room crammed full with one set of grandparents, ten of their children, thirty or so of their offspring, and then one and a half (the pookie in my belly is the half) of the kids' offsprings' offspring. That evening we came home to supper with my Mom-in-law's family, including Gommie, who was sprung from the nursing home for the day and lay comfortably on the living room couch, eating Utz party mix out of its barrel and looking incredibly cute and happy to be in her own home for the day. It was a lovely Christmas.

Today we spent the day working on a complicated puzzle at Gramma's kitchen table with Gramma and my dad-in-law. It was one of the more wonderful, relaxing events of the trip. It reminded me of the niceness of sitting around at your grandparents' table in a kitchen that still looks the same way it probably did in the sixties, and doing pretty much nothing except for talking. It reminded me a lot of my Yiayia's house and how it would probably be if she were still around. After that, we went to the old tobacco plantation that Mark's maternal grandparents still own and rent out and we spent a few minutes taking pictures of those things you never see in Massachusetts - ancient tobacco barns with vines and trees growing on and through and around them, giant untrimmed trees in front yards, and acres and acres of farmland. On the way home from there, we stopped to take a few pictures in front of the church we got married in almost two years ago. Married two years, engaged nine months, dated nine months, met a year before that. It's all gone very fast, but what an incredibly wonderful thing it has been. I love my second family and the man who decided to bring me into it.