WOLFRAM!!! Missed you, dear! And a happy belated Chanukah to the cubs!

Hi Wolfram! And thank you very much!

I was just driving along Sunset with the top down. On Christmas Eve. How awesome is that?

I will admit it is not as awesome as the Santa I saw the other day in the LeBaron convertible.

That soiunds very awesome, Kristen. My favorite LA Christmas sight was a couple on a motorcycle in full leathers, with the passenger carefully clutching a very traditional wreath.

Allyson, if you're out there: the shuttle bath toy was a HUGE hit with the nephew. (The other goodies were also fabulous, but that one was the winner.) We ended up saving a couple of presents for the Xmas morning because Kevin was getting irked that we kept asking to make him stop playing with the shuttle long enough to open another present.

I tried to get him to record a thank-you message, but by then he was very tired and also sick, so I'd tell him to say something and he'd just stare glassily at nothing. Poor little guy. I'll try again sometime when he's conscious.

My nephew stuck floam on the heads of the astronauts from the shuttle toy and made it crash into things. I'm sure it says something about him. Probably "one of us" (us being members of my family.)

That sounds adorable, Robin!

And we often have that problem in our family, too, Strega. Once the girls open a present they love? They don't want to look at the other boxes. Kids today.

In other Christmas news, I bought myself a present...a new phone. I was tired of my old clunky walkie-talkie Nextel thing (especially now that I have no need to walkie or talkie) and wanted to upgrade to a shiny new phone. But now I fear I might have upgraded too far, too fast since I have no freaking clue how to work this thing.

You need to text people like this:

Im in ur tv

rightin ur sho

My 2-year old nephew does the same thing. At his birthday, he was totally enraptured by the chalk he got with his new easel and couldn't be made to even look at his other presents until the chalk was hidden from him.

On Christmas morning he drove my sister nuts because he wanted to play with the Weebles Castle he'd opened from me on Christmas Eve instead of opening any of his new gifts.

I personally seem to recall being a greedy little kid and anxiously opening each present in turn, then being disappointed if each new gift wasn't cooler than the last one.

I still have a tendency at Christmas to try to guess which of my gifts are going to be the coolest and then open them in the order of least to most cool. I'm rarely successful, though.

My mom was always very specific about the order in which I opened gifts. The grandkids? They get to run wild and pick what they want to open first.

And, dude, I need to figure out HOW to text message people first. I think I've mastered the making of phone calls. Next up, master changing the volume without accidentally taking a picture.

My mother occaisionally tells us to open one gift before we open another (because gift A is an accessory for gift B and opening them in the wrong order gives away what gift B is) but otherwise our family just opens gifts in whatever order we choose.