We had a truly blessed weekend. Friday evening, everyone was over to open gifts, as our oldest grandsons needed to take advantage of the opportunity to see Uncle Nic while he's here; they were headed to their respective other families for the remainder of the holidays around 9 on Friday night. It was great to have everyone there (well - almost; Josh had to work).
The music really couldn't have gone better. A friend who'd never attended any of our services was thrilled with midnight Mass, deeply appreciative of everything from the (hour of) pre-service music to the beauty of the liturgy. It was pretty fabulous. Then it was a shorter-than-usual night's sleep for me, as I needed to be up early to work on part of Christmas dinner that I just didn't have time to get done in advance as I'd planned. Another wonderful liturgy on Christmas morning and, following an unexpected delay due to Emma awaking from her nap sick, everyone except the two grandsons were back for dinner. We wrapped up the evening with friends, concluding with a marathon game of Bones.
I set the alarm Sunday morning to do music for both Masses, then managed a short nap before we took 4 of the grandchildren to see Tangled - which was entertaining, if typically Disneyesque. Came home to watch the DVR'ed Ravens' game (only takes half as long!) and then we had a simple dinner of leftovers followed by our first-ever viewing of Holiday Inn, which was a little uncomfortable due to the use of blackface and stereotyped roles. But I was surprised by the number of tunes I recognized, in addition to the well-known White Christmas. I thought Holiday Inn's integration of story and production held together better than in its better-known successor (mostly - the inclusion of the war footage wasn't so effective), even if it doesn't seem to have withstood the test of time as well.
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