Christmas in Vermont

Date published: December 29, 2005

My annual trip home for Christmas went well this year. The eight hour trip there and back seemed shorter this year, probably due to the dry roads. Usually the weather gets worse as I drive back to my home town. It's up in the mountains of Vermont so there tends to be more snow than here in Rochester. Apparently I picked the best travel days, other than the tiny bit of rain as I drove back into Rochester, there wasn't any precipitation at all.

The biggest improvement to this year's Christmas versus last year is that Christmas at each set of grandparents' houses was better. At my maternal grandparents' house, the absence of my cousins Eric and his wife and kids caused the house to not be as crowded as it seemed the year before. At my paternal grandparents' house, the addition of my cousin Kisha's new (and first) child, Carver seemed to put some more positive energy in the air.

I was talking with my mom about Carver (after a discussion about the genetics of eye color), and I thought that it was funny how cool it was that Kisha had a baby. It's not like she is my first cousin to have a child. In fact she's like the fifth of my first cousins to have a child. I think it just that I grew up around Kisha and her sister more than all my other cousins.

Anyway, he's just an adorable baby...clearly he got some of the same good looking genes that I got. ;)

One of the unfortunate things about going back to the hometown is that a bunch my relatives want to spend time with me (either because of a computer question or just to hang out). I'm only there for a week, so I usually don't get the chance to visit all of them to the extent that they wish. See, I try to make the trip into a vacation of sorts, meaning that I just want to lay around and be lazy and relax, meaning that it cuts down on the amount of time I spend with those relatives.