Loralee's Fancy: Organ Transplant

Today I need to talk about something really important.

Just kidding!

I'm really going to talk about Christmas some more!

Despite all the extra stuff we were doing all the way up to Christmas Eve, we managed to get the house fairly clean and our traditional dinner all cooked by 6:30. (Michael asked, "How long has this dinner actually been a 'tradition'?" He did say it with the extra quotation marks—I could hear it. Well... Only about three years, I guess. But it's yummy, so now it's a tradition.) We used paper plates, so clean-up was easy. Hooray!

Then we watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas and A Charlie Brown Christmas while we hid in our respective corners, behind large pillows and piles of wrapping paper, and finished wrapping all our gifts. For the rest of the evening we played some games, ate snacky things, and then wrapped up the evening watching The Christ Child.

I guess I got to bed before midnight—which is saying something on Christmas Eve.

But then I had to visit the bathroom at 4:00 a.m. I went back to bed, thoroughly intending to continue my long winter's nap, but I was still awake at 5:00. So I got up, figuring there was no sense, or kindness, in tossing around and keeping Bruce awake too. I went and sat at the computer, and played dumb solitaire games. Then at 5:30 I heard an alarm go off. Really?!

My three stinker girls all got up, went down the stairs and into the great room where they sat looking at the tree and the presents, and talking and giggling together. (Actually, I think this is their tradition. 😊 ) I thought for sure they'd go and "wake me up" at any minute. But by 6:00 they hadn't made their move, and I was tired enough to go back to bed, so I did. I waited for them to come get us, but I just fell asleep again pretty quickly.

The girls finally did start knocking on bedroom doors at 7:00, and I woke up more groggy than I had at 4:00. Ah, well.

Breakfast went into the ovens to bake while we opened gifts. My kids with jobs had gotten gifts for everyone, and we had the things I got, and a couple of things that Santa brought us—including a banana chair! It was nice. But we couldn't open the home-made sibling gifts because Jason and Adreanna spent their Christmas Day with her parents; that tradition would have to wait a couple more days.

Bruce got the first gift of the morning: nestled among twelve
pairs of socks was a book of Dad Jokes (from Lindsey).
And then we had to listen to him read out Dad Jokes for a while before we could get back to opening gifts.

We had our lovely—traditional—breakfast around 9 a.m., and when breakfast was done I would have gone back to bed...but we were expecting Daniel to come and help Bruce unload my giant surprise from the van. Daniel showed up around 10:30 with his brother-in-law, Nick, and his older kids, Thomas, Ruth Ann, and Hannah. I prepared our afternoon/evening meal for the oven—with my back to the goings-on—while I heard the grunts and clunks and movings of fate. Or a Christmas present.

They had to remove the door from its hinges
in order to get my gift into the house...

And the entire time I was hoping that I would be sufficiently excited and pleased after all the build-up of the past couple of weeks. (Oh...wow. You got me a mechanical bull. Thanks...?)

They did finally wrangle it into place, but to do it they had moved the table so it blocked my path from the kitchen directly to the great room. I had to go around, through the hallway, through the living room, through the dining area, and then in to where my gift sat. The paparazzi were there with their cameras along the entire route.

I walked into the great room and saw...

This cracks me up—look at all the cameras pointed at me! 😃

An organ!

A full-size, performance/church organ (32 foot pedals and two ~~keyboards~~...registers), in a really beautiful wood console. Wow!

I also got a box of organ music, and about ten old music magazines called The Etude, which were printed in the early 1930's. I may copy a couple of the covers of those, frame them, and hang them in the great room, near the organ. Maybe.

It didn't take me long to start wondering if Bruce, who is a terrible liar, actually lied to me when I asked if he'd gotten me an organ, or if that was one thing where he just said, "That would be cool!" What do you think?

Anyway, the man who called Bruce way back on the ...third?... day of Christmas was a guy in our ward. His brother-in-law wanted to get rid of this organ that he's had for about thirty years, but he wanted it to go to someone who would use it. He got it from a lady who had it for around twenty years, and she got it from the old Ashley Ward Building, and we didn't know how long it had been there. And now it belongs to us. Wow. (Actually, I'm still trying to wrap my head around this.)

We spent the rest of the afternoon visiting with friends. The Ray kids and our kids exchanged gifts and played a game together. We ate more snacky stuff, and in the evening we watched a movie; End Game, I think (which is when I fell asleep). Then we played some of our new games—Big Boggle, and Splickety-Litt. Fun!