Nichou & Traddles

Christmas.

I generally eschew the overcommercialization of the event, and this year was no different. It was a quiet Christmas, spent alone with my immediate family, and on the phone with the greater family, and it was full of food and cosiness and the crackling of the fire. Wrapping paper burns up real good, especially when it's got santas all over it, somehow.

But this Christmas also had and new extra-special treat: two new additions to the family.

The first and clearly most important was that Sarah and I were asked to become Nichou's godparents, you know, in case we should happen to accidentally kill Kurt and Jennifer somehow. We participated in a very nice ceremony via video chat with Chicago, and it felt good to welcome her into our family, as welcome as we have always been made to feel by hers.

I wore a purple tux, Sarah wore orange velvet, but I think there's really no contest: Kurt's dad's jacket trumped them all. The wisdom of age.

And then, as if one new and miraculous addition to our family weren't enough, what should we find on our step the next morning but a package from Kurt and Jennifer and Nichou! The gift that keeps on giving.

He's a jackalope, the lepus temperamentalis, a real-life dead specimen of that most elusive of cornuted species, never catalogued in the official annals of animal taxonomy, but fabled nonetheless in the lore of the American West. We call him Traddles, and have hung him prominently, in a position of honor within our home.

I must add that Sarah digs him too, which came as a bit of a pleasant surprise. Any other animal, I think, would have been relegated to the hallowed walls of my personal office space; but not Traddles. Maybe it has something to do with his mythological status, his special place within the evolutionary heirarchy of the many mammalian species. Perhaps. The world may never know.

But what I do know is that this Chirstmas has brought us two new family members, and we are very grateful indeed for them both, and in very very different ways.

O happy day!