This year for the first time I got to stay home ALL DAY and enjoy Christmas with my immediate family. I've wanted that for fifteen years, but we always had to go up to Akron (a four-hour round trip) to have Christmas with some of my extended family. This year we got out of it somehow, and nothing else I could have received would top that. Not that I dislike my extended family or anything, but on Christmas I wanted to be with *MY* family (i.e., my immediate family). We're going up to Akron on January 1st instead, which is a vastly preferable arrangmenet as far as I'm concerned.

Oh, and this wasn't a Christmas gift per se (more related to the new year if anything), but my boss managed to get the board to approve a week of paid time off this coming year for part time employees such as myself. (It's a week based on the number of hours we work per week, so if I work 25 hours/week all year, I get 25 hours of paid time off sometime.) In addition to a raise. That I must say is a pretty good deal too, and more than I expected, especially with the ecconomy like it is and a lot of people happy just to have a job at all.

Lesse... my sister made me a quilt; that I'm sure was a lot of work, and it's very nice-looking to boot, so that's a pretty good one. My other sister managed to get a really incredible deal (I didn't get a number, but it had to be like $2 or so based on what she did say) on one of those nice glass chess sets, and got me that in addition to the "real" gift; I like the chess set at least as well as the "real" gift, personally. Being a cheapskate, I've always made do with cheapo $1 plastic sets with cardboard boards, but now I don't have to.

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