Christmas Eve & Glad Yule

First off, I'd like to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas and a Glad Yule.

I celebrate Christmas here more out of a sense of cultural imperative than any religious meaning, I am not a Christian, nor are my wife and kids. Honestly most of the people I know are not, unless they are at least as old as my parents, which is why the religious right getting involved in and powerful within politics always scares the hell out of me. Most of the people I know that are roughly my own age are, at best, nominally Christian if they profess that religion at all. A good number of my peers are Atheists or Pagans of one stripe or another, but we all pretty much celebrate Christmas anyway, although some of us call it Yule and point out that the Christians took most of their holiday traditions from either the Germanic Yule or the Roman Saturnalia, both of which occurred at roughly the same time of year and had more fun traditions than praying in church all day, like gift giving and parties, but I digress; this isn't really a post about the Christian take over of Yule.

My family always had a tradition of giving us kids one gift on Christmas Eve, I modified it slightly today and gave my kids the "family" gift of a new X-Box Kinect and set it up and transferred over the X-Box live accounts and all that, the kids have had fun with it and so have I; between waving your hand at it and using voice commands it's like a cross between being a Jedi and having a Star Trek voice activated computer. The coolest thing about this was that Fed-Ex delivered it today, Amazon said it wasn't supposed to be here until after Christmas, they upgraded the shipping on it free of charge and of their own volition.

Oh, and this came in the mail today too-

Not as complete as I'd hoped when I was bidding, but OK for the price.