Hmm, let's see. Where did I leave off. Ok, so, on the 21st we went to the market, picked up a Christmas tree that lucky Dylan got to carry back here, decorated it up and generally hung out. Dylan made soup. Then Dylan and I headed off to the airport yet again to pick up the in-laws! It was relatively uneventful (read: evil airport men didn't yell at us to move after 5 sec of sitting at the drop-off/pick-up area). After some late night chatting and catching up, we pretty much all crashed.


Oh, around then it hit Dylan and I that in all the excitement of people getting here, we had kinda forgotten about that whole Christmas thing. Oops. Cue next few days being spent with annoyingly large crowds of people searching for presents to put under our lovely tree. Side note: Dylan and I only brought a few strings of lights, a strand of garland, and 6 ornaments (5 of which were My Little Pony and all 6 had come from the lovely Em). Our tree was slightly bare, but people kept telling me that going out and buying ornaments for our first tree would ruin the progression and story of all our future trees. Anyway, all of a sudden it was Christmas Eve and we had all of our presents acquired except for something for Dylan's daddy. Now, we did have something for him theoretically, but we wouldn't have it physically for a few days. So, since he needed to have something to open on Christmas Day, we decided to make him something. It sounded like a good idea to us, especially since making presents is the sort of thing parents swear they like. This being said, starting to make a present the evening of Christmas Eve is NOT a good idea. Especially when you're me and refuse to use things like, I don't know, the copy and paste feature. Oh well, it got done, even if Dylan and I were responsible for Christmas morning being less Christmas morning and more Christmas mid-afternoon.

Other Christmas Eve events included my sister giving my father the present of a webcam and setting him up with Skype, so I got to call and talk with/see most of my family for the first time in forever. Talking to 6 people at the same time is quite a difficult feat, but it was nice none the less. Then Dylan, his family and I all took a speed-walk through the neighbourhood to go to midnight mass, only to find out that none of the million churches around us were having one. Weird.

The rest of Christmas was good. Lots of puttering around while Dylan and his Dad somehow managed to cook an entire Christmas feast in our humble little kitchen. Dylan only almost lit the kitchen on fire once! That's an exaggeration; he just filled the house with smoke when he left his mulled wine unattended for too long. Good times.


Boxing Day, Dylan worked. So the rest of us split up. Us lady folk got dropped off downtown to do some shopping at Forever 21 (not my ideal way to spend the day, but I thought it'd beat sitting around at home alone and it turned out to be fun), while Dylan's dad and brother were going go to MEC and pick us up some more bagels. Except when we were leaving, Dylan's dad took the keys to start the car and then had to bring them back to me so that I could lock the door and I may have forgotten to give them back to him. Meaning that he couldn't turn off the car after dropping us off. Actually, any key can turn off the car, the turning it back on would have been the problem. And, on top of that, they drove all the way out to MEC (it's not amazingly far away, but it's hardly in the center of town) to find out that it was closed that day, then they drove back to the bagel store near our house to find that it was also closed (which is really weird, since they are normally open 24hrs). Needless to say, I felt a little guilty. They texted us just as we were finishing up, came and picked us up, and then we proceeded to get horribly lost. Not lost so much as led to the wrong place. There is a street way the heck in the middle of nowhere that has the same name as the street we live on. Guess which one the GPS decided to start giving us directions to? A little bit after we drove past a road that I was pretty sure was the last reasonable one to turn on to get home, I mentioned that I was pretty sure the GPS was leading us astray, that I thought we were getting close to the end of the island, and to be careful because it is fairly easy to be forced to leave the island without meaning to. More or less as soon as I said that, we saw the sign for the bridge and found ourselves taking a nice trip to Longueuil. It took a bit of work and a collective feeling of wanting to throw the GPS out the window, but we eventually made our way home.

This puts us right before Dylan and I took our trip to Maine, which is quite the story in and of itself, so I'll call it a night here. Sleep tight Internets!