Tuesday, December 25, 2007

The Christmas Schbang

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(L-R) kaitlyn, betsy, schmitty, luke, eric, me, tim, kara, and lisa

i love the above photo, and you should too.  for some reason, it reminds me of the intro to Friends, that popular TV show where jennifer aniston brought her hairdo, the middle straight hair part, to millions of teenage girls across america.  there’s a lot of people in that photo, but even more came later in the evening.

a week before christmas, kara called me about doing a christmas shindig.  her ideas were sledding, ice skating, christmas movie, hot chocolate, gingerbread house making contest, snowball fight, fly to the moon, and more.  in short, we were gonna pack every winter and christmas activity into the same day.  so after looking around for a place to do it, we settled on my house.

in the days prior to the event, we saw warmer weather and the snow began to melt.  so that kinda threw sledding and snowball fighting out the window.  we really didn’t want to be throwing mudballs at each other; it just wouldn’t be healthy.  eventually we settled on cooking a christmas dinner, eating it, going ice skating, roasting marshmallows and making smores by my fireplace, drinking hot chocolate, and having a gingerbread house competition.

the day of, schmitty picked me up to go grocery shopping for all the gingerbread house and dinner materials.  we ended up standing 45 minutes in line at meijer because the place was so packed with christmas shoppers.  in those 45 minutes, we struck up conversations with our fellow linesmen and failed at a word search on the back of our ice cream cone box.  when we finally got out of meijer, we were late to get back to my house and eric geerlings, tim, and eric rottman were already there.  by the time we got home, eric geerlings had to go do a family church thing, but he promised to be back later in the night.

so we began cooking at 3:30ish.  as we were starting up, kara, lisa, betsy, luke, and kaitlyn arrived.  so we made ourselves busy in the kitchen following our friend’s recipe for chicken fettuccine alfredo.  it’s the same recipe we used for our previous christmas party which is in the previous post.  we also made an asparagus and breadstick dish from some random recipe i still remembered from my freshman summer in toronto.

dinner came and went, with lots of munching, chewing, and slurping, and after we had digested for a while, we decided to head to rosa parks for ice skating.  around that time, i called allie, who couldn’t join us for dinner but wanted to go ice skating with us.  she met up with us as we drove downtown.  after half an hour of parking frustration (we searched for free spots by the side of the road), we ended up going to a parking complex where lisa happened to have a discount coupon.  relieved and itching to skate, we arrived at rosa parks.

initially, we were concerned about huge crowds because it was the last saturday before christmas.  but when we arrived, we saw that there weren’t too many people.  we headed over to the nearby art museum (i discovered later that the museum was the new, LEED-certified art museum i had heard lots of good things about) to pickup skates from the rental place.  after paying $1, we were ready to go.  i bumped into morgan, a high school girl i went to colorado with for young life, who had just finished skating and was about to leave.  i’m glad i wore high socks, because she forgot to, and she showed me the consequences.  ouch.

this was the first time i had stepped onto the ice this winter, so i didn’t really know what to expect.  thankfully, ice skating’s kind of like riding a bike, and it came back to me after a few minutes.  the ice was pretty bad, but i guess that was good for me because it wasn’t as easy to slip out.  lisa and tim had only ice skated once before, but they picked it up pretty quickly during our stay.  by the time we left, i was working on crossovers and eric rottman was beating me at every race we could think of.  i think i one point i was given a half-rink head start skating forwards and he still beat me skating backwards.  i guess he proved that he’s more of a canadian than i am!

after ice skating, we returned to my house where eric geerlings, schmitty, and his girlfriend erin joined us.  some of us played ping pong, while others roasted chocolate stuffed marshmallows around the fire.  at around 11, we split up into 3 teams and brought out the gingerbread house making materials.  we had graham crackers, ice cream cones, lots of frosting, and various candies.  i was teamed up with eric geerlings, tim, and kaitlyn, and for the next hour we slaved away at making a replica of the taj mahal.  although our finished design was a precise 1:2341 replica of the taj mahal, we lost to a square house that featured an outdoor marshmallow propane tank and candied lawn chair.  the houses are still sitting in my basement as i figure out what to do with them.

after the contest, we chilled around the fire a bit.  luke was falling asleep again, as he does every time he’s in that room.  my housemate matt decided to return from canada at that time, and he was welcomed by a slew of cars parked in our driveway.  he had just finished a seven hour drive from his home in southern ontario, so he was exhausted and headed straight to bed after saying hello to everyone.  by now, midnight had passed, and after some cleaning up, people started heading out.  kara had the longest trip ahead of her having driven in from holland.  after some tearful farewells, hugs, and kisses, the last car pulled out of our driveway to reveal matt’s car stranded by the side of the road.  he hadn’t even been able to pull into our garage because of all the cars!

Posted by Nehe555 on 12/25 at 11:43 PM
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