The Long Overdue Christmas Guest Post

February 20, 2023

Julie's note: The following is a guest post written by our three kids. I feel it my duty to point out that you may encounter confusion-inducing inside jokes and generally quirky family humor. You have been warned! 😉

Happy new year again!

---------------------

One of our new years' resolutions was to increase the quality of our blog-writing. Unfortunately, this blog post — normally written by our erudite selves — had to be outsourced to unpaid and unreliable northerners that can't write a blog post within a month of when the event actually happened. We don't know how this happened. Rumor has it Rick was too busy researching tail-lights. Or it was the armadillo camper invasion missed by the borked security camera.

In any case, this post will be a little different. While once you had rich and vibrant explanations of how Rick put a phone on a stick, here you will only get grainy pictures of Alan's closet. The critics have spoken, and they say that the following was written by children.

Enjoy! (Thanks for the guest post spot Mom and Dad! -- Alan, Audrey and Andrew)

---------------------

Mom and Dad arrived at the Minneapolis airport on December 16th after de-icing caused a few hours of delays.

Look at that lovely couple!

 We treated them to a handsome dinner of guacamole, cheese, crackers and Aldi quality Crab Rangoon dip.

Here is a beautiful picture of our dinner:

Oh wait, this is a picture of some closet mint. Whoops!

Alan then ditched the family to spend the night chaperoning "the youth" at a parish youth group sleep-over. He claims to have slept three hours, but we are dubious. Luckily he had ear-plugs to (kinda) drown out the 4am video games and celebrity impressions.

The next morning (Saturday), Mom and Audrey had some bonding time at the French Hen, a cute breakfast place on Selby near St. Paul's Cathedral. We also have a great picture of Audrey's breakfast, carefully arranged:

Is this a basil plant? In the closet? Maybe there was basil on Audrey's crepe...

Mom and Audrey walked over to The Yarnery, a cozy local yarn shop where they chatted with a "lady with nice earrings," reminding Audrey of her illustrious professional knitting career. They then wasted an unholy number of hours shopping. No one knows where.

Saturday was the last showing of Les Miserables, put on by the Orpheum in downtown Minneapolis. Alan impulsively snagged the "obstructed view" seats in the left balcony because some online reviews said they weren't that bad. That is, unless a tall man sits in the corner of the box. Regardless, it was a great show, and we got a good view of the pit! Alan thought that Javert jumping off the bridge was a little bit rash. Andrew can't comment because he couldn't see the bridge.

On Sunday, we went to the Twin Cities Model Train Museum. Mount Rushmore made of Legos was impressive!

Can you spot the skunk?

We put up some Christmas decorations on Sunday. 

A long time ago, Mom and Dad attempted to cancel Christmas by buying a Christmas tree with white lights instead of multi-colored lights. Fortunately, our combined "persuasion" (at the commanding ages of 6-9(ish)) convinced them to remove the hideous white lights. Mom painstakingly removed "each and every light" and restrung the tree with beautiful, colored bulbs. The weeks of effort were worth it because Mom did all the work. (Thanks Mom!)

15 years later, the tree lives on.

So apparently Audrey is a "grown-up" now. What else could explain the attraction to sanitized white lighting? Don't worry, after Audrey undid all of Mom's hard work, Alan spent several hours (re)-planting colored bulbs throughout the tree.

Andrew standing in the aura of "Kamruh Artiphact," a rare atmospheric phenomenon.

Alan's attempt at an artsy tree picture

On Tuesday, Andrew, Dad, Alan and Alan's friend Lukas played laser tag at the Mall of America. The arena was an absolutely awesome sight:

This is not laser tag. This is a bucket of dirt. In the closet.

On Wednesday, Mom and Dad slaved away providing a sumptuous dinner for the St. Mark's rectory which Audrey got credit for. Since the Fathers were dubious of our apartment's hosting capacity, we brought Moroccan beef stew, salad and a mint chocolate cheesecake to them at the rectory. Audrey went above and beyond with the cheesecake decoration!

Alan thought that the flowers looked "carnivorous" without color. The final version included candied mint!

(For the record, Alan and Audrey maintain that they can host 10+ guests in their apartment.)

On Thursday, we patronized Everest on Grand, a local Nepali restaurant. The most notable food items were the jackfruit and the bone-in goat meat (not in the same dish). We made sure to stay clear of the windows, as the high temperature for that day reached a mere -2°F. Incidentally, because St. Paul uses no salt and plows only when absolutely required, the roads were beautifully white, treacherous ice slides. 

Think this, but deeper, more packed and not just on the sidewalks. 

The next day was a smashing success — a total adventure, a crash-course in bumper-to-bumper fun.

A hit-and-run while parked on Marshall. RIP Huckles, 2019-2022.

Alan now has to gets to go car shopping.

Rumor has it this was taken immediately prior to Huckles' demise.

Anyway, the Kovals spent their Christmastime in a multi-day engineering project. Normal gingerbread houses are not cool enough, nor do they require enough hard labor or tedious experimentation. Instead, Alan and Andrew decided to make a functioning gingerbread windmill, with Mom and Dad opting for a replica of their camper.

The ruler and calculator are out! Incidentally, ownership of the obviously superior ruler (shown) is currently disputed.

Gone with all the smiles, this is serious business!

The latest innovation in Gingerbread technology is Jolly-Rancher windows. Here, Audrey grinds the colored candy with a meat pounder on a cast-iron skillet, in preparation for melting. Note the damping effect produced by the pot holder.

Dad spends almost as much time stabilizing his real camper.

The table.

Mom and Dad's completed creation.

Alan and Andrew's finished creation. The blades are made of melted Jolly-Rancher panes in a gingerbread scaffold (similar to the camper's deck roof). You will note the sagging in the blade positioning; turns out the center cog was too thick for the frosting to set completely, even after several days. Plus candy cane dissolves in liquid frosting. However, the blades did effectively turn on a candy-cane axis. One had to do it... gingerly though.

Audrey's creation, an adorable little church. Note the stained-glass (Jolly-Rancher) windows on the back and sides. Though this is technically not an engineering project, Audrey is given a pass by sheer cuteness, as per her style. 

We would be remiss to omit the Christmas eve dinner tradition. Last year's mystery meat surprise was Mackerel; this year's was Bison, ground up in stuffed acorn squash.

Aww, the whole family on Christmas Eve!

The completed meal... er, a dead plant from Alan's closet? Huh.

Christmas morning saw a return of the Christmas present puzzles! Mom and Dad spent a good while coming up with something that would challenge Alan's ability to "not think too much." We did some diving in suitcases, made wild conjectures concerning number groupings, and overall successfully prolonged the present experience for more than an hour. A true Christmas tradition in the Koval household!

The octave of Christmas saw us in Illinois, visiting family. We decided that Andrew's car Carl was the least likely to break down, considering that Huckles was now out of service and Huffles (Audrey's car) is 20 years old. This is probably true, but we still made a pit stop at a gas station to reattach a dragging plastic piece with some wire.

Dad and Andrew casually retrieving some cardboard from a nearby dumpster to lay on under the car. The dragging plastic chunk was way under the car!

  In Chicagoland, we visited Babi and the Bazars, but mostly patronized Goodwill. We weren't counting, but would guess we spent close to 60 hours at 37 Goodwills. Audrey bought maybe 3 items and Alan managed to snag a copy of the movie Inception that turned out to have a dated aspect ratio (that made everyone fat), so it was worth the time. Andrew initiated the Bazar cousins to Minecraft, and we pulled out an old china crate from Babi's crawl space:

Look at that crate!

AudreyAnna Jones, finding lost German treasure

After a quick visit to our old neighborhood friends the Glenns, we made it back to St. Paul on New Years Day. In the wee hours of the morning, we sent Mom and Dad on their way back to Florida where it is always 80 degrees and sunny.

A classic Minnesota morning

Minnesota Gothic

There is a google group email list which can send you an email when there is a new blog post. Instructions for signing up here: Subscribe OR directly join here: Google Group