Weekend wrap up from Griswoldville

Exciting things happening around the Smith clan this weekend.  It was my direct and extended families Christmas parties.  Let me just say that my extended family is kind of large and gets bigger every year.  Kids just keep appearing every year at family outings and I personally don’t know where they came from.  I end up playing a game of match the baby to the parent. With so many kids, they’ve tried to find ways to entertain everyone and spend time together as a family.  Well this started out as something to get the kids out of the house while everyone got to my Granny’s house and got everything set up and ready.  It has now turned into a yearly event that everyone waits to start until everyone has arrived.  Normally they have a county wide scavenger hunt with the kids broken up into 3 groups and they have to drive all around completing task and finding items on their check list while being video recorded.  This year though someone was apparently inspired by the hit TV show "Minute to win it".  They still broke the kids up into 3 teams, but instead of driving all over creation, they had to complete a task in a minute or less.  My bride and I don’t normally compete in the scavenger hunt so we didn’t compete in this years event either.  One, it was cold outside, and two, we’re both just too school for cool, (thanks Pink).  I’m pretty upset that I was a slacker and broke the number one rule of blogging and didn’t take a camera or any pictures this entire weekend.  There would have been some classic shots of the competition.  One thing I’m the most upset about not getting a picture of is the ridiculous amounts of food that we have every year.  Mainly all sweets, cookies, brownies, cakes, pies, dips, sausage balls, and every other goodie you can think of.  The spread gets setup in the morning and we all just graze on it all day.  If you leave there hungry it’s your own fault. 
On our way home from the Christmas Extravaganza my bride and I saw some white on black dog relations.  The white dog always trying to keep the black dog down, the white dog trying to screw over the black dog, I’m talking about some roadside dog loving if you weren’t picking up what I was laying down.  Again, another time that I wish I had a camera handy.  Since most of you guys don’t know my family, they live out in the COUNTRY, it’s almost a 45 minute drive to the nearest Wal-Mart, an hour if you want to hit up a Target.  So I’m sure seeing a dog giving another dog the business is quite the norm to those folks, but not something my bride and I see everyday. 
Sunday Morning we went to my parents church.  My Bride and I showing up almost doubled the weekly attendance.  You’ll be hard pressed to find another small country church smaller and more countrier than this one.  It’s so country there’s a dog there at the front steps to greet you.  Now they just need to train the dog to hand you a bulletin when you walk in.
After Church we went back to my parents house to enjoy our Christmas lunch and exchange gifts.  We open gifts one present at a time starting at the youngest and going to the oldest so that everyone gets to see what everyone else got.  It can take some time to open gifts this way, but it’s nice to see everyone’s reactions to the gifts they got.
We used to open our families gifts on Christmas Eve, we’d light all the candles in the house and my dad would read the Christmas story from the Bible as we sat in the glow of candles and the light from what has to be one of the world’s ugliest Christmas trees.  How we started doing this, I have no idea, but now that we’ve grown up, moved out and away, it’s something we don’t do anymore.  I guess part of the reason is we open gifts during the day now so no need in candle light, and my nephew’s are little too impatient to sit through a reading of the word with gifts sitting in front of them.
After all the gifts had been exchanged and all the food eaten my bride and I headed home.  We made a few stops to look at Christmas lights in the falling flurries, there are some pretty big displays in Columbus this year, and one is raising money for Make a Wish, so we stopped by and made a donation.  All in all, it was a good weekend.