Well, for the first time I can recall, I didn't spend Christmas with my family this year. "Aha!" you say. "Sounds like quite a stroke of luck for the old family!" you say. With my own personal family being unavailable, I spent Christmas with someone else's family.

So! Off to Granville with my old pal Marty! His folks are great people, and Christmas is as good a time as any to see them. In fact, it's better than most, because all his family get together in one place then, so it's a lot more time-efficient than trying to track them all down individually.

All families, I'm sure, have there own particular holiday traditions. In my family, for example, Dad always reads aloud "A Child's Christmas in Wales" by Dylan Thomas, my Mum always fixes up a pile of mince pies with brandy butter, and my brother always drinks too much. Then we pull the Christmas Crackers, and put on the funny hats and read the enclosed lame jokes. The jokes are always lame. Mum always buys the cut-rate budget Crackers.

So its interesting to experience the holiday traditions of other families. Evidently, it's a tradition in the Maki household for Marty to split shortly after dinner (even if his invited guest happens to be deeply engrossed in a discussion with Marty's dad, who does cool things like fly his own plane, and flew fighters in WWII, and has pictures too) and go to yet another family, that of Marty's friend Brant, and eat dinner again.

Brant's family were awesome as well, and Brant's dad makes totally awesome home-brew beer. Not like the nasty home-brew you might be offered in other, lesser households. "Drink all you want!" he says. "It only costs, like, fifty cents a bottle to make!". Excellent advice!, but in all honesty I fear that his generosity may have contributed to the fact that I can't seem to recall his name. Sorry, Mr Brant's Dad!

Then Marty drove me home, and just as in the closing of "A Child's Christmas in Wales", "I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept. "