Deck the Halls with TMI!

Emily may have decked her halls with OCD, but my family decked ’em with TMI! (That’s “too much information” for those of you who live under a rock.) Last Saturday my two older brothers and I, along with our spouses and kids, gathered at my parents’ home for our own little family Christmas. It was an all-day affair, starting with brunch and ending with dinner. In many ways, our family Christmas is atypical. For one thing, we all LIKE each other and have a great time together (right, guys? Right?), so it’s generally a very relaxed, easy-going gathering. Also, we all live near each other, so it’s not like we have a year’s worth of catching up to do in one afternoon. So basically, we just eat, open presents, and hang out. This year, however, there were two things that made this family Christmas special. The first was that it was unseasonably warm, and we were able to send the kids outside to play after presents (SCORE!) The second is that my brother Andy and his family brought this with them:

That’s right, the “EyeClops”. The EyeClops is like a microscope that you can plug into your TV, so you can view whatever it is you’re looking at on the screen. Andy & Sarah had purchased it as their family gift this year, being the good homeschoolers that they are, for the “educational value”. (Andy is also a high school biology teacher. Does that make the EyeClops’ presence seem any more legit?) And let me tell you, it has a LOT of educational value. Thanks to the EyeClops, I now know a lot of things about my family members that I don’t want to know. That’s right, while celebrating the birth of our Savior, we examined each other very up close & personal. Like 200-times-magnified up close and personal. I saw inside my brother’s nose (hairy), inside my dad’s ears (very hairy), and got some great views of my brother’s taste buds and arm hairs (he is generally QUITE hairy, except for on his head of course). I got a gross-out look at my nephew’s hangnail (right before brunch…appetizing), and found that one of my other nephews still has a blue stitch in a scar that got left in there. Whoops!! All of this was incredibly fascinating, but the coup d’etat was when Andy allowed the EyeClops an intimate look inside his BELLY BUTTON. Not only was it HAIRY, it was also full of LINT! VERY FULL! When he held the EyeClops up to that hairy orafice my whole family screamed “AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!” in unison and HORROR. It looked like all the baby spiders from Charlotte’s Web had crawled in there and each spun about 15 webs. It was very, very scary. Andy claims he was extra-linty because he had on a new t-shirt, but I think it’s because he’s GROSS and all his HAIR traps stuff in there. Whatever the reason, it was hilarious, horrifying, and very-un-Christmasy. BUT, pretty much par for the course as far as our family get-togethers go. 🙂

Now I shall regale you with the top 5 EyeClops-induced quotes overheard at our family Christmas:

5) “You can see the hairs on my dad’s head really good ’cause the hairs are so little and far apart.” (My nephew about my brother Andy)

4) “Oh man, that’s gotta come OFF!” (My brother about a bump behind his ear)

3) “Oh, honey, that canNOT be healing right!” (My sister-in-law about my nephew’s hang nail)

2) “I knew it! I knew there was something blue in there!” (My other sister-in-law about my other nephew’s scar with a stitch in it)

1) “That sucker’s so big I can hear it growing!” (My dad about his own EAR HAIR!!!)

So, now, I know you ALL wish you were part of my family so you could’ve been in on all this fun…and I haven’t even told you about how my dad went up on the roof to get some of my nephew’s lost darts and ended up fixing the gutter! (Me: What’s that banging noise? My brother: Oh, dad went up on the roof to get the darts and found that the gutter was broken. Me: Ohhhh (cause that was not at all surprising!))

Maybe next year I’ll have a Christmas contest on this blog and the winner will get to come to our family celebration! I promise you it will be a once-in-a-lifetime event!