Christmas at home!

after 13 hours from dallas to tokyo and 4 1/2 hours from tokyo to beijing, a night in beijing and a 3 hour flight from beijing to kunming, i am home. kate and i got back yesterday at noon, went to see rosemary play a basketball game, and then went to my mom's company christmas party... had a good long talk with zhang jin, then hung out with alison and melissa, our cousins in every sense but blood... this morning we just stayed home and had a service as a family, did our traditional advent reading and lit the candle. our tree looks like it always does - junky. :) mom refuses to throw away ornaments we made from burnt matches in middle school, paper cutouts from kindergarten; pictures of us in tiny homemade frames make a timeline of the years. kate and i have been unpacking our trunks and frantically wrapping the christmas presents, so that the office, where we've stationed ourselves, will no longer be "off-limits" and the rest of the family can check their email again.
it's a beautiful winter day here in kunming. the sky is that faded blue that i love, a mountain sky. we can see the mountains clearly against the horizon, layered against each other in shades of blue and grey. my parents make the same jokes i remember year after year - inside jokes that only our family would understand, a one-line reference to our stories. it's good, good to be home.