Where the lovelight gleams

One of my all time favorite Christmas songs is "I'll be home for Christmas." I'm not sure why I've loved it so much. I've spent every single Christmas that I can remember with my family. This Christmas will very happily be no exception. However, it will be the second Christmas that I can remember where I won't wake up at the crack of dawn with my younger sister. It was an odd sensation last year to wake up at a decent hour, and to wonder out to join my parents. I'm used to my sister waking me up when it is still dark and going to see what Santa left in our stockings. We aren't extremely close, but I did miss her last year and I'm glad that she and her husband will be spending the holiday with our family.
In other holiday news I helped host a holiday dinner last weekend. I made a chocolate cake that has a pound of chocolate in just the frosting, and a bruschetta pizza that was better than I had thought it would be. Our friends brought food and we laughed and talked as we prepared everything. While some of us were in the kitchen others had turned on the Wii and were playing some sort of Mario Brothers game. For some reason instead of turning it off they decided to leave it on while we ate. So instead of Christmas music playing in the background, my holiday dinner party was serenaded by Donkey Kong, Yoshi, Daisy, Mario and others. When someone finally commented on it we all cracked up. Most of the people there were hard core gamers, but all of us had played Nintendo growing up. The music hasn't really changed in all these years and we all had stories about the music driving parents crazy.
There was one upside. After dinner I was helping to clean up while others finished playing the game. When I went to grab something off the table my boyfriend teased me by trying to poke my belly button. I laughed and tried to spin away while grabbing his hand to stop him. He spun me back around and we ended up dancing and laughing in the middle of the kitchen. All in all it was a great night.