Nice Christmas. A quiet day.
Sunday, December 26 - Had Sonnie and Harm over for dinner today. Had a real good time - then to Jeans for family party. Bud and I went to the Plaza to see the lights.
Monday, December 27 - Did the washing and then rested the rest of the day Sure have enjoyed my three days off.
Christmas with The Simpsons.
This is all in code unless you know the players. Sonnie and Harm are my sister and brother-in-law. Sonnie, Sonjalee to be exact, is my half-sister by dad's first marriage. I also have a half-brother, Bill, that we rarely see. He lives in L.A. and is a physicist with North American Rockwell. I absolutely idolize him.
Getting the house ready for Christmas dinner must have seemed like preparing Downton Abbey for the Queen, but really, the house is so tiny that you could clean it in a hurry, and whatever else you needed to do was close at hand. We didn't entertain. It was a very small house.
Of course, there's always some kind of get together with mom's family. Dad doesn't go to these parties, I think mostly because he feels generally uncomfortable in social settings, more so with mom's family. The comparisons to his own family are stark in contrast.
The crowning glory of the holidays in Kansas City are the Plaza Lights. The Country Club Plaza, a sort of cowtown Rodeo Drive created by real estate magnate J.C. Nichols had the toniest shops, restaurants, and eateries. On Thanksgiving, the entire city shows up for the lighting ceremony that lights up miles of Christmas lights arranged on all of the buildings of the Plaza over a fifteen block area. The area stay lighted through the first week of January, and people come from all over to see the spectacle.
It's a big deal.
If you had asked me earlier, I would have said that the first time I ever saw the Plaza Lights was the Thanksgiving night in 1966 that I drove my '57 Pontiac and parked on top of the Hall's Plaza parking garage with Karen Stover in the seat next to me. Now I know I had been there earlier.
In all the years I lived in Kansas City, I never photographed the Plaza Lights. Weird, ain't it?
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