All this world is but a play, be thou the joyful player

It is not true that everyone I know came for eggnog (and mostly stayed for dinner), but the combined powers ofgaudior and rushthatspeaks and their two-month-old Fox, Gaudior's mother and stepfather, schreibergasse, sharhaun and his girlfriend who is almost certainly not on Livejournal, and David and C. made for a busy and lovely Christmas Day full of good conversation and friend groups I don't usually get to introduce to each other for extended periods of time and I held the small child and we got dinner on the table before everyone who needed to leave for work in the evening had to leave and there was further hanging-out afterward and after all the guests had gone home, I fell over sideways onto the couch under my jacket and slept for an hour and a half.

derspatchel got me two books I had not even suspected: Alan Cumming's You Gotta Get Bigger Dreams: My Life in Stories and Pictures (2016) and the out-of-print hardcover of Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot, Man of Mystery (2008) I had been coveting at Comicazi for more than a year. He seems to be liking the new biography of George Herriman I got him. We fed the cats their Christmas present—salmon—as soon we got home and hung the scratchboard drawing of a nautilus from my parents next to the glass-fronted cabinet. I still want snow, but I think I'm going to settle for watching some Frank Capra or Preston Sturges on TCM.

Merry Christmas, all.