By Tuesday, all the snow had melted and I took Maddy for a nice long walk over to East River Park. All of the trees were ringed with wonderfully-fragrant Christmas tree mulch!
...just pictures of Maddy sliding into the room in dog socks witha a concerned look. Hahah. Saddest holiday dog ever! She hate her holiday socks so hard!
Brett double-checking a suspect bag of cookies to make sure my mom hadn't substituted real holiday treats with "healthy cookies." Coast is clear, they're the real McCoy!
Around 3am, we ran out of firewood and someone got the bright idea to round up a bunch of Christmas trees that were left by the side of the road and bring them down to the beach! MORE FIRE!
Christmas trees piled up next to the dumpster. (You gotta save them and bring them to the park so they can mulch them! Then the park smells like delicious pine trees all year)
Also a big fan of the Mac n' Cheese with a Hole Punched in It ornament. This was clearly made by a procrastinator who got nagged by his girlfriend on the way out the door. "But honey, the invite says we HAVE to bring an ornament for the tree!" Hahaha.
Then it was time to head to the living room and open some presents! (It's a long-standing tradition in my house that we open presents that night before Christmas - it was a tradition born when my parents realized that this was a better alternative than my brother and I waking them up at 5am in order to unwrap our loot!).
Sunday was Christmas Day for the Battjers! It was kind of quiet this year because my brother was out in Ohio with his girlfriend's family so it was just me and...
After the lights were on, we decorated the tree with ornaments and put all the presents we'd wrapped earlier in the evening underneath! The tree looked gorgeous, but it was definitely lacking something. Then it hit us, we didn't have a star or an angel to top the tree off with! So we decided to look around Fatty's apartment and improvise. Grant poked around under Fatty's bed and found...
The condom was funny and all, but it looked a little lonely up there all by itself. So we decided to look around the apartment for something else that we could add to the top of the tree.
These are Meredith photos of where I was teaching my mom a game where you take turns pretending you're laughing in an attempt to make the other person laugh for real.
Back at my parent's house, Meredith was marveling at our tree. (Ok, more likely she was marveling at the fact that my parents have their tree plugged into a Clapper.)
Here's Grant nursing a couple of beers as he got up the courage to ask some of the burly men for their best tips on how to get women to have anal sex, etc.
Mom and her new putter. Look out Tiger, Mrs. Battjer's on tha up and up. (Oh, and look at the tree in the background, White Power Santa's back! But only because the lightbulb inside the light-up lawn gnome we put on the tree started to melt the plastic needles of our fake tree and it smelled like burning. A likely story Mom...or shoud I call you EVA?)
We decided to take immediate action - we removed the evil, White-Pride Santa and replaced it with the giant, light-up lawn gnome I got my brother for Xmas.
On the way home from Cherry Tavern, a well liquored Josh Teixeira took it upon himself to start attacking people Wolverine-style with a discarded Xmas tree he found lying on the side walk.
This photo is the one we went with for the Photo Greeting Card. The rule was that when you smiled, both your top and bottom rows of teeth had to be visible. Otherwise it wasn't a true "Holiday Cheer" smile.
The Crackhouse's Tree, freshly cut, presumably from someone's lawn, adorned in all of its glory with soda cans, rubbers, a fern from someone's bio project that somebody else thought looked like dope, and a pentagram on top. This photograph was taken before the party started. Once the party got going, many others added their own creative decorations.
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