Christmas is a time for visiting family. Yesterday we picked up my mother and went to my sister's "new" house for brunch with our families. Unfortunately my younger son and my older son's girlfriend were working. However, my niece and two nephews helped boost that Christmas excitement quotient stoked by Mom's (my sister) insistence we wait to open presents until after the main course. It's a cruel world, eh!

They say the "devil is in the details". Too bad there's a few devilish details to finish off at my sister's place. Plasterers came this week to repair / redo / fix the ceiling. They came without drop cloths, kept leaving the door open and left early. Now, I haven't done much drywall taping and cornering but I think I could do a better job than these yo-yos who are supposed to be "professionals". Good thing my sister and brother-in-law still have that 10% hold back until "completed to their satisfaction".

My wife and her sister arranged a party for my in-laws on the occasion of their sixtieth wedding anniversary today. Yes, it is quite an accomplishment my two wonderful in-laws. The extended family already includes four great-grandchildren.

Of note:

• My in-laws were picked up by a stretch limousine. My sister-in-law wanted the party location at the Bluffer's Restaurant to be a surprise so she didn't tell her father. He assumed it was to be at another restaurant where the family had celebrated my mother-in-law's eightieth birthday. He got quite upset and argued with the driver that he was going the wrong way.
• My sister-in-law worked hard and wrote everywhere. My in-laws have congratulatory greetings from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Her Excellency the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson, The Prime Minister of Canada, Jean Chrétien, His Melness the Lastman, Mayor of Toronto and others whom I have forgotten. I attribute this memory lapse to to the wine passed out amongst us before we sat down to eat lunch.
• We remember sister Corinne who passed away a little over a year ago from cancer. Christmas is a hard time with memories like these but we can't let happier events go uncelebrated: especially at Christmas.
• I met my wife's cousin from Espanola for perhaps the second time in 25 years. They had lost a son through a terrible tragedy when, as a passerby, he tried to intervene in a fight outside a bar. We remember Ryan. Still, these sad events sometimes have a way of bringing families together. This cousin reminds me of his father, my mother-in-law's older brother, one of those persons whose face is always "crinkling" with a smile and a kind word. Unfortunately it's getting too hard for him to make the trip down from Timmins.
• A comment from the restaurant manager to my father-in-law, "60 years ... with the same woman!"
• My father-in-law's parting words to some of his guests, "See you at the seventy-fifth!"
• Good food, good friends, great family — always a pleasure to have been married into this family, oh yeah, and good wine, too!