Merry Christmas! I've already opened all my presents, and am basking amid the detritus. My cat is drowning in treats, and I in enough candy to make my dentist weep.

(Is it entirely ungrateful to start being WTF? about my family's presents? Does good taste dictate that I wait until after noon for that or something?)

Merry Christmas, those who keep it, bright and happy day to everybody! We're off shortly to pick up StY and head down to the MIL's, where the rest of us are waiting for giftwrap carnage and turkey destruction. Safe travels, everyone who's on the move today. Full tummies and good company to us all.

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it, and happy Saturday to those who don't!

My family has not yet opened presents. People are getting dressed first.

I always knew they were weird.

I want an iPod, dammit.

t brightly

Guess what I got for Christmas?

Presents are goooooooood.

There's a bag under the tree that says "Here's the pony!"

So I guess I'm set.

Merry Christmas to the celebrators and a Happy Damn-Everything's-Closed to everyone else.

There's a pony in bag? COOL!

We have stuff! It's so fun.

Happy day to all.

(I just spoke to my parents. apparently my bro and SIL are buying a house with 17 acres of land! and my parents got 4 feet of snow this week.)

Pony in a bag. I'm thinking Godfather. Or maybe just Jack Skellington.

Lalalala! The Good Underwear Fairy has been! Lalalala! I have fabulous underwear! And clothes! Lots of exciting new clothes! And I like all of them! Especially the cleavagalicious wine-red blouse with the lace-up batwing sleeves! Lalalala!

t /materialistic

eta

Actually, damn it, I'm NOT materialstic, generally speaking, and the biggest Xmas gift is certainly getting to hang with my family (love love love and LIKE my family beyond all power to express it), and seeing them all like the stuff I got them (to the point that my Mum tried to persuade my Nana she didn't really want the gold-embossed cream-and-toffee coloured leather pouf thingy with the Egyptian designs on it, and should leave it at my Mum's place, and my Nana becoming deeply suspicious and defensive about said pouf, and watching over it in a hawklike fashion)...but, dude, I've had about 3 new items of clothing in the past twelve months. Total. Now I'm back in Britain I'm already all "Ooooh!" about clothes I'd left here and forgotten existed, and I went shopping and bought myself a few new skirts in the sales, and now Santa has brought me more clothes! It's VERY exciting.

I want an iPod! Unfortunately, of the people who might buy me such an expensive thing, my mother's getting married, my father's building a house, and my brother... lives in San Francisco.

Not that that's any excuse for giving me a non-Buffy-related Vampire Watcher's Handbook. I mean, okay, it looks kind of amusing -- marginal notes and coffee stains and drawings and the like -- but I'm not really interested. Plus, there's the sort of depressing sense that all he really knows about me is that I liked Buffy and thus would appreciate "some vampire stuff".

Eh. Enough bitching. I have new Tan Dun! I have hair things! I have cat treats!

Ah, I remember the year I got the Star Trek: The Original Series alarm clock. Despite not being a Trekker, or even a Trekkie. On the basis that I like SF and weird cult shows, type of thing.

It was...spectacular. A 3-D Enterprise suspended over a plastic faux-planet surface, with a curving black starscape behind it. The buttons were hidden in the craters. When the alarm went off, light beamed down from the ship to the planet, and a generic bloke voice bellowed "Landing Party to Enterprise! Beam us up, Scotty!"

I laughed, and laughed, and laughed, and laughed. And laughed. It's the sort of gift I'd really have appreciated if I were a Trekkie. As it was, I just marvelled at it.

Dude, it would rock if you still had that.