Merry Sithmas!

So the presents are opened, the food is inhaled responsibly consumed, the Santa myth tradition is preserved for yet another year ... and, once again, my family kept its promise not to get too vulgar with the Christmas consumerism.

I got some socks, a few extra pieces for my new dish set (in case a Clumsy McDishDropper comes for a visit), a deluxe Scrabble game (to replace the ghetto Scrabble I've been so embarrassed to use when my cruelly judgmental friends come over for an evening of Vocabulary Smackdown!), and a nice quilted flannel shirt to match the ones my dad and brother-in-law also got (1, 2, 3: awww!).

The kids, as should be expected, got the best haul again this year, racking up a (modest) pile of toys, books, more toys and even a bunch of mouse crap Disney consumer products to gear them up for the family's upcoming WDW vacation at the end of January.

Most painful toy: My niece's American Idol! karaoke machine. At 4, my niece has yet to master the art of matching tones--and the poor thing has NO grasp of reading lyrics off a TV monitor--so as the rest of us listen to endless loops of "This Old Man" and "I Been Workin' on the Railroad (Dancefloor Mix)," she just kind of moans incoherently into her microphone and creates A Very Yoko Ono Christmas atmosphere for everyone within earshot.

Most retro toy: My nephew's Battleship game. He's 6, and while he can figure out coordinates on the battleship grid (because he's our little genius), he's not so big on things like strategy or accurate peg placement. Which makes the game VERY long.

Least Christmas-like activity: My sister's family got the entire Star Wars DVD set, and we watched Revenge of the Sith this afternoon. All 843 poorly acted hours of it. I'm no science fiction/mythology/religion fan, and I think the last Star Wars movie I saw was the one where Harrison Ford got frozen in a block of stone. And I saw it when it was still in the theaters. Back when Parker Stevenson was steaming up my TV (and my hormone-addled adolescent brain) each shirtless week on The Hardy Boys.

Um ... where was I? Oh, yes: a galaxy far, far away from interesting. A galaxy where people and little puppets say things like "You fool! I have been trained in your Jedi Arts ... by Count Dooku!" and "Hold me, like you did by the lake on Naboo!" and "Into exile I must go. Failed I have." without once looking straight at the camera and mouthing the words "Sorry to have to put you through this, Folks. I took this job just to pay for the implants." A galaxy where the shag haircut never seems to go out of style. A galaxy where nobody has figured out that long opera capes are about as useful as oversized sombreros when you're jumping in and out of tiny space ships and engaging in heated swordplay. A galaxy that has mastered the science of holographic conference calls but seems to have lost the prenatal technology that would alert the wife of a fancy-highrise-dwelling military superstar that the baby she's carrying is actually twins. (If only they'd had the budget to hire Dr. Tom Cruise as her ob/gyn. If only.)

Unbearable Lightness of Being a Sith Lord notwithstanding, it's been a pretty spectacular Christmas. The family's all here, we're all healthy, and we're lucky enough to be able to buy each other's love nice gifts and stuff our tummies with Norwegian recipes that have been made in my family every Christmas for generations.

Plus, I got new socks!