The DeLong Family Christmas where we took a poll on who preferred room temperature cheese

It was THAT time of year again. The much anticipated DeLong Family Christmas. Famed in song and story with its revolving tree, couponed pizza and the festive hum of football on the television as we open our presents.

It was the usual cast of characters. My sister-in-law, Jen who is utterly obnoxious in her fabulousness. I spent an hour picking out a sweater to combat her and realized, when I received two compliments, that my family was patronizing me. Pretty, smart, and practical, she is a wonderful mother, single-handedly rips out walls and can build her own cupboards with her bare hands. My nieces, Alexis and Alea, long the recipients of horrendous gifts from their clueless Aunt Amy, have developed quite the acting ability. They opened up their hat-scarf-glove combos made in Nepal and reacted as though I had given them front row tickets to a hip, cool band that's so popular with the kids these days, like Boys 2 Men. Sure, it was a bit confusing that Alea's chicken hands were sporting paw prints but we assumed that they don't have chickens in Nepal and just did the best they could.

My gift to nephew, Talon, was, for once, kind of a winner. I have given that kid a record-breaking number of broken toys so I owed him big. Once we were able to wrestle the hover-craft away from my niece, Fallanne's, husband, Talon thoroughly enjoyed his gift. Actually, Colby (the man, not the cheese), was grounded from the hover-craft. "Talon, don't hit the ceiling with that toy," my brother yelled, unaware that his own son was the victim of a gift-jacking while his son-in-law was busy wrecking Grandma and Grandpa's house.

In a shameless attempt to drum up more followers, I led a lively self-promoting discussion about my blog. "You know what you need," my nephew Colby said as we played cards. "Yes," I answered, glaring at him, "I need you to remember what trump is." "You need an app," he persisted. "You need to learn to float so you won't drown when you go to Mexico next month," I responded, honing in on his Achilles heel. "How hard could it be," he mused, whipping out his fancy phone and did a search for how to make a app. "An app," I snapped before turning on my niece, "How hard is it to hit the follow button?"

The evening concluded with a wonderful group photo. As an elementary school teacher, I cannot NOT do a silly photo at the end. "Isn't that a double-negative?" Colby interjected, "You're going to correct my grammar while you go around using double-negatives?" Any-hoo...please take another gander at the family picture. My mom and dad clearly win first prize but this year's boobie prize goes to Sydney with her super-model pose.  We yelled at her for the entire drive home, leaving early so we could all get back in plenty of time to catch Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon on SNL tonight. Cuz that's what Christmas is all about.