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I spent the weekend in Bedford to celebrate Christmas with the Carvey family. We got to Bedford on Friday afternoon around four after finally wrapping-up our last gift construction activities. My gifts are more elaborate than Sarah’s by nature so I was a major hold-up in the mix causing Sarah to let me know that I was responsible for the long line at Trader Joe’s that prevented us from purchasing a gift certificate for her brother. I couldn’t understand her logic since I am sure that the reason for the long lines at Trader Joe’s was the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ about two thousand years ago but I’ll take credit where I can get it.

The Carvey family wasn’t all available when we first arrived. Andrew was running an errand to drop a friend off in New Hampshire and Nick and Christina were in California with Nick’s family celebrating the first half of Christmas. Three cats were available for fun play-time and meowing conversations including the two visitors Curtis and Claudia. Curtis is a giant black cat who could be mistaken for the six foot talking cat in Master and Margarita. Claudia is his female companion. Mischief is the cat who actually lives in the Carvey family residence and wasn’t available for comment but appeared not just annoyed that two other cats were in the house but that people were sitting on her favorite chair.

In general I have seen the future of my Christmas and Chanukah and it is a new commercial version called Chrismukkah. Some people are already making greetings cards and gifts for the occasion and fighting over the naming rights. Anyways the basics of a Carvey family Christmas are as follows.

The pre-dinner screening of progress on the artificial knee project lasts about an hour. I got a full tour of each joint and the recent modifications to the spring mechanism moving from a Kevlar spring to a steel spring due to problems with delaminating, cracking, and general problems casting the spring. But the project moves forwards with lots of foot-pounds being available for the spring. The latest new project was to take a number of foot-pads commercially available at the drug store, most of which are deodorant to create a control system based on the rocking and pressing of toes. We had a long discussion about how much weight the soldiers in Iraq carry on their body in order to operate. It’s about a 90 pound pack without considering the body armor, the M-16, and random pockets full of ammo and grenades. They do get into good shape.

Next it is on to watch television in the living room. In this case it was a James Bond movie “You only live twice”. It was so close to the story and characters in Austin Powers that it is worth watching just for the fun of it. The main evil character has a white furry cat and is bald with a big scar across his face. He works inside of a fake volcano with a tank full of piranhas that eat his minions when they fail to kill James Bond. The Spike network unfortunately has the most annoying way of breaking-up a movie every ten minutes to display a terribly repetitive set of advertisements about whether James Bond was Naughty or Nice.

The standard meal at the Carvey household is steaks. It is also the standard meal on Christmas. The steaks are sent via the Omaha Steak company from an uncle. Normally Nick makes béarnaise sauce for the steaks and separates egg whites to make the sauce using a nose shaped container that has the whites come through the nostrils appearing like snot. I now have one of these as a gift from Nick and Christina. So it is of no surprise that we had steaks for dinner that were ready during the middle of the Bond film. So we ate them as the movie was coming to a close and they were ready just in time for the arrival of Sarah’s brother Andrew.

Soon after Andrew arrived Sarah’s parents went out for their annual Christmas chorus at the local church for about five hours. It was getting cold outside and some snow was starting to flurry so me, Matthew, and Andrew went outside on the porch to check out the snow just as we began watching the movie Prizzi’s Honor on DVD. We had vowed not to watch any more movies with commercials, at least not on Friday night, the night before Christmas. We got very hungry once we got back inside so we devoured the remains of some guacamole and chips as well as a bunch of salsa. Sarah also had some cookies leftover from a cookie swap. One item of particular interest was an item made from pretzel sticks and goldfish snacks that were glued together with a butterscotch material. It tasted good at the time. Matthew was having a good time pretending to be a red dragon from beyond on the sofa.

I was having a terribly hard time following the plot of the movie. It is very convoluted and everyone in it hatches plans that sound something like this.

“OK. We need to get back at the Gambizzi family and make back the money that we owe the bank. So we’ll kidnap Freducci, the bank manager on behalf of the Prizzi family who will ransom him back. Because they are in on the take for the bank they will get the money from both the ransom and the insurance money. That money will pay for our gap in cash and allow us to pay back the money we owe the Gambizzis.”

The plans people made in the movie were actually much more convoluted than that but I had enough trouble trying to process the plot that I gave up on understanding the plotting. Everyone double-crosses everyone too. I liked the movie but it was tough to figure out what happened. I just had to say to myself – That’s not going to work out as planned.

I also spent some quality time having a long conversation with Curtis, who was sitting next to the television. I would say something like meowwooowww and he would say something like meoowwwoooohhhooww and then I would try to say what he said then he would try to say what I said. This lasted for about ten minutes at which point I must have said something in cat that translated to “Your mother was an ugly black feral whore-cat” so he got up from his scratch post and left in a huff. I am still working on my cat language.

On Saturday morning it is officially Christmas and time to open some presents. But we didn’t awake until about noon so we were ravenously hungry. I had read through the GRE flipbook to learn some vocabulary before getting out of bed because I was too lazy to reach into my bag to get my book out. Matthew had left it in the room. I knew about seventy percent of the words in the book leading me to believe that I am not ready to take the GRE right now. I wasn’t planning on it but it is a good thing to know on Christmas morning. So given that we were hungry we decided to pick-up Sarah’s friend Dave, who was trapped in Boston working at the Gap as a manager over Christmas and had been invited to the Carvey family for the holiday. So we drove into Brookline and back which was the only time I spent outside of the Carvey home until we left on Sunday afternoon.

To handle the hunger I made some omelets for everyone using some scrumptious soft cheese. Then we went to open the presents.