This Christmas we have invited Daniel’s parents and sister and his colleague Ilya with wife and two children. We also invited Misha, as we do every year, but he already made plans to spend it with his girlfriend and her family in California, so he could not join us.

I made a list of all the things that I need to buy on Thursday evening and spent 3 hours Friday morning food shopping. I went to 5 different stores, but at the end the refrigerator was full and I was happy.

On Saturday morning we went to a speech therapist with Arosha — he is still working on shortening Russian R and integrating it to speech. Also, his Russian “sh”, “zh” and “ch” need a little correction from time to time, since he tends to substitute them with English versions, which are very similar, but still somewhat different.

We switched therapists a few months ago since the previous one stopped making home visits, was very expensive and kind of stopped being useful altogether. This one is less expensive, but has a lot of work experience back in Russia, so I hope that she’ll be helpful with honing that stubborn sound. Daniel’s dad usually drives us to and from — the ride takes about 7 minutes and I could have done it myself, but I am mortified with parking, which is not so easy to find in that particular neighborhood.

After speech, we went home, ate lunch, and I spent about an hour prepping meat for my main Christmas course — beef braised in red wine. I also made a huge batch of compote out of apples, frozen black currants, raspberries, and sour cherries.

Then we had tickets for Christmas show “Morozko” in Russian Theater on Brighton. This is the second time that we’re going to the Christmas show there, and I am pretty happy with the quality of production. Both times it was a Moscow troupe touring USA. The children enjoyed the show, which is the most important thing.

After the show Danya picked us up and we went for a nice dinner at local TGIF restaurant. Arosha and Anюta shared a steak.

At home, after children went so sleep, I spend another hour in the kitchen making filling for spanakopita and tiding everything up.

So imagine my disappointment when at 5:30 in the morning we were woken up by Anюta, who told us that Arosha keeps throwing up on his bed and needs our help. To make things even better, Anюta developed a nasty barking cough overnight. There was no way we could have anyone over for at least 3-4 days.

Arosha kept throwing up until 1 pm and then once more before bedtime. I have a stomachache for two days straight, and so does Daniel. I cooked part of the meat and a bit of potatoes yesterday, and chicken soup today. I really hope that no one else will end up throwing up for 8+ hours, because, well, it sucks. I am glad that Arosha feels better today and even managed to eat some soup. This was quite an unglamorous Christmas, but I guess everyone has to have one of those once in a while.

Also, a few weeks ago Daniel and the kids put up a Christmas tree. This is the third year when we use artificial tree instead of a real one, and I have to say I am pretty happy with it — real trees are not cut; set up and clean up is way easier; and we’ll start saving money next year since the price for this artificial one was 3 times the price of the real ones that we would get.

It took Danя about 5 minutes to set the tree up, and then Arosha and Anюta decorated it all by themselves! No, really, I must have put one or two ornaments on the tree, and that’s it. It’s amazing what a good job they’ve done! During the last few weeks Arosha and I kept buying new ornaments and putting them up. We also got a new topper star to replace the old one that just stopped working.

After many many years of buying a real tree every year we kept procrastinating this year until the very last days. Maybe one of the reasons for this is abnormally warm December. They are predicting 69 degrees tomorrow — that’s late spring weather.

Anyhow, this year we decided to order an GKI Bethlehem Lighting artificial tree and overnight it from Amazon. It came out pretty nice looking. On the plus side there will be no needles all over the place, on the minus side — there is no that special smell.

It arrived today and we spent a couple of hours with kids decorating our tree, our living room — trying to get into the spirit of holidays. The next big question will be where do we store it after the season passes.

A little bit more then a week is left in the year 2007. We’re making ourselves a holiday. We put up Christmas lights all over our living room a week ago and put up all kinds of New Year stuff around our apartment.

Yesterday we went out and bought a Christmas Tree for $50. Since this is our first New Year in our new home we wanted to get a real one. As always it really adds to the spirit of holidays with its look and especially smell.

Today we had a nice evening with friends. Lenchik, Alex and Maruks came over. We ate a small dinner and sat and talked for hours. For tomorrow Alena is cooking a Christmas dinner. We should remember to take some pictures.