A new Christmas Eve tradition is born?

Several months ago I bought a groupon for all of us to go ice skating.  Then life just got crazy busy.  The groupon expired on December 25th, so I figured that we would go skating either the Saturday before Christmas, or on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. 

It turned out that the afternoon of Christmas Eve was the perfect timing.  What it meant was that we started our family time together that day at 3pm, instead of at dinner.  And we had such a great time together.  When we got to the rink there were a fair amount of people there, but with 30 minutes most of them had gone and there were less than two dozen people on the ice. 

When we arrived Santa was actually out on the ice skating around—that was kind of fun!  (Sorry—only cell phone pics this time.)

For some reason ice skating is an activity that really seems to draw our family together.  It’s not that we skate in a big Ray group around and around the ice, but we seem to keep coming back together in different combinations and truly having fun together.  We stayed until they were almost ready to close and then wobbled off of the ice and changed back into our regular shoes.

Two memories:

First, I sat down by a little boy to change my shoes because one of the kids had mentioned that these little kids were speaking with British accents.  (The whole group, adults & kids alike, sounded like they were visiting from England.)  The little boy, adorably blonde and maybe 3 years old, put his face really close to mine, and then he said in his charming little accent,

are you….. someone’s nanny???   (except that it sounded more like “ah yuuu”)

Ouch!  I rallied quickly and told him that pretty soon I would be someone’s nanny indeed.

Second: we realized that we had forgotten the Monterey Jack cheese necessary for the Christmas Day mexican feast and so we drove over to the closest Fred Meyer after we left the skating rink.  It was 5:54 when we got out of the car and we knew that they were probably closing at 6.  Sure enough, the worker at the door told us we’d have to hurry.  No problem, we said, we just needed some cheese.  And some ice cream.  The funny part was that the whole 3 or 4 minutes that we were in the store they were announcing “Customers, we are closing in 4 (3, 2, 1) minutes.  Please take your items to the checkout counter to pay for them so that our employees can go home to spend time with their families on Christmas Eve.”  It was very entertaining!