Christmas in New York

Well, once again this is pretty delayed. I'll see if I can shorten the lag time between the actual event and post in the future. It may be easier since it looks like January is going to be pretty uneventful.

OK, Christmas in New York....trying to remember, it seems like a really long time ago.

Marna and I left work abit early on Friday and drove up to Catskill (which is about 4.5 hours northeast of State College). Not too much happened during the day on Christmas Eve. Marna's friend Dave (who went to highschool with Marna and is now living in San Francisco) drove down from Albany and spent a few hours with us. We exchanged presents and played quite a few games of Sorry. The Nelsons didn't manage to win a single game.

Christmas Eve night we had a traditional Polish dinner (I think its traditional anyway) of pierogies and Oplatki. Oplatki are rectangular wafers that you offer to everyone sitting at the table and they break off a piece and say something like "health and happiness" or some other good-luck/will blessing.

Christmas Day begin with the opening of the presents, which took quite awhile actually. We all tried on our presents and took a few pictures.



The presents that can be seen in this picture are my shirt and shovel, the hat Ben is wearing, the bag Marna is holding (she totally loves the bag), and the robe Marna's mother is wearing.

Here's a picture that was accidentally taken while I was trying to get the camera set up. Notice the enthusiasm being shown by Ben.



We then had a dinner of ham with all the fixings before Ben had to drive back to Potsdam to work on the ski hill the next day. All in all, it was a wonderful holiday.