See You Next Year

I would like to begin this post by announcing something that has just occured to me: by the end of today, I will have eaten cheese for all three meals. I had cream cheese on my bagel this morning, and a hefty selection of leftover Christmas Eve cheese and crackers for lunch. For dinner---my Last Supper, as it were, as I'm leaving for San Francisco in the morning---my mother is honoring my request for macaroni and cheese (or, as English people call it, macaroni cheese; I'm not sure why we leave the "and" out of it, maybe because we're too stuffed from eating it to exert that much effort), as well as apple and blackberry crumble. I was going to say that I've probably gained a good twenty pounds being home this week, but come to think of it, I think I've actually gained a good twenty pounds just writing this first paragraph.

So anyway, it's awkward that I haven't actually asked you this before, but how was your Christmas? Ours was great. It was the first, if you can believe it, that I've spent with Sean---yep, in all our fifteen million years of dating. And while Sean has known my family forever---he first met Luke and Susie when they were in the third grade, for instance---I was still just a tiny bit worried, beforehand, that he might not....how do I say this?....know what to make of us at Christmas. We are a little bit loud, you see. And enthusiastic. And we have all sorts of weird and wacky Christmas traditions that I was slightly concerned might not.....translate.

(What in the the HELL have I married into?, he's thinking.)

One of the best things about Sean, however, is that he is a very good sport. And he fit right into Christmas at the Burns house, just like he'd been celebrating it with us all along.

He even joined in with the annual Burns Family Christmas Eve Singalong, an event that I am not at all embarrassed to say I look forward to all year long.

(Ah yes, Piazza New York Catcher, that old Christmas classic!)

He wore the hat from his cracker during Christmas Day lunch....

.........made sure his wife always had a full glass of champagne....

........and made himself very useful taking pictures of a family that has yet to master the art of the self-timer and therefore has very few photographs of all six of them together:

In fact, he took a whole bunch of photographs:

(Man, look at my parents. Let's all hope I got those genes.)

(I come from the "Oooh, Let's Try It On Right Now!" school of Christmas present opening. Jacket, pashmina, shoes: all new!)

(The four most beautiful words in the English language: sausages wrapped in bacon.)

There are about a million more photographs of Christmas 2009 here, one of them featuring my unparalleled excitement at opening the world's most beautiful desk chair, which I have been lusting after for years (no, really, years.) In a strange turn of events, I bought Sean a desk chair too---mine was from my parents, so at least we didn't buy them for each other---and in between my excited flapping, my brother Tom turned to look at us wryly. "Wow," he said. "Desk chairs for Christmas? Man, I hope I never get married."

So now it's the day before the day before the new year, I haven't even started packing to go back home, and 2009 is rapidly coming to a screeching halt despite the fact that I have yet to make any moony, nostalgic, sweeping generalizations about it. Around the dinner table this Christmas Day, though, we did ask each other what our favorite moments from the last year were, and while I will forever remember 2009 as the year I got married, I'll also remember it as the year my parents moved back to the states and I finally lived close enough to them to pop home every month, which---strange as it may seem---I haven't actually been able to do since I went off to boarding school aged eleven. So having my family---well, my parents---close by this year has probably been one of the very best things about it. We're all making up for lost time.

How will you remember 2009? Does any one moment stand out from the rest? Did you have a crappy year or a fabulous one? Oh, how I hope it was a fabulous one.