Merry Christmas from the Colemans

All in all, it was a pretty good Christmas round these parts. We're all here, all doing well.

Last night we had dinner at my cousin Chris' house, with many, many people we'd never met and a handful of people we had. The kids had fun playing with their Miller cousins, and everyone marveled at the cookies that Cate made. She's been baking up a storm the past few weeks, first for a choir bake sale and secondly for, well, this. I've had trouble keeping away from them, to be honest. Stupid cookies!

Elizabeth was up late with Cate finishing up a project -- a gift for Amelia, their favorite cousin -- even after I got home from Midnight Mass. Of course, Midnight Mass was at 10 p.m. We didn't have anything that required assembly this year, but a lot of gifts to wrap, and I had a lot of those on my plate this year. So for those of you who got inexpertly wrapped presents ... uhh, sorry.

This morning nobody came into the bedroom before 7 a.m. and we actually didn't unwrap a thing before 9. (Thanks, Cate, for the extra hour or so of sleep.) Presents were opened in shifts today: the ones we exchanged with the kids and from Cate's mom and our friends were opened before we all went to church this morning, and the ones with the rest of the family weren't opened until after dinner.

Oh, dinner. Wow. Dinner was a Neil creation, primarily, with the rest of us contributing items or hands. But he roasted the beef tenderloin with a nice dijon mustard sauce and also grilled scallops for the non-beef set. I'll have you know Cate tried a scallop and liked it enough that she ate another as well (remember seafood is still new to her), though we were not able to convince Elizabeth to expand her palate as well.

Elizabeth reports, not surprisingly, that opening presents was her favorite part of the day. (She's just woken up and can't get back to sleep, so I solicited her input.) She likes the new fleece blanket that Nonna made. Each of the kids got one, and in fact, the other two are sleeping underneath them as I write.

Surprised Elizabeth didn't mention the Wii, but then again, she's a down-to-earth kind of girl. And the Wii was the last thing they opened. We can thank Cate's mom and sister for that one. I actually am interested to see what one of these darned contraptions is all about, but have barely used one. We'll get it set up.