The blur of memory

Today'sYesterday's Holidailies prompt: Your most vivid memory from last year's holiday season.

I don't really tend to pay a lot of attention to prompts - I usually manage to find things to rattle on about without them - but when I tried to remember last Christmas, it was all a big blur and that did interest me. The only thing that sticks out about our actual Christmas celebrations was that I had two pre-teen cousins* who got this huge pile of Hannah Montana merchandise between them - a really staggering amount of it. (I was wondering the other day if they're still into Hannah Montana or if she's all last year and they've moved on to something else. I will try to remember to report back on this later.)

* I suppose they're technically cousins once removed or something, since they're obviously not of my generation. That's another thing I tend not to pay much attention to, though, and I just call them all cousins.

So anyway, the reason Christmas was all a blur, presumably, was because we had Vegas on the brain. Last year (as some of you will recall) my husband and I left late in the afternoon of Christmas day and flew to Las Vegas for a few days. I loved it and I'd do it again, but it really did distract me from the family holiday celebration to a large degree. Which is sort of sad, in that we have had this big void about family Christmases and there are members of my family that have gone out of their way to include us. All of my grandparents' generation is dead now, in the family, my mom and my uncle are both dead, my sister has been on this huge anti-Christmas kick and my dad usually spends Christmas with his (third) wife's family. So my aunt - the widow of the aforementioned uncle - and her children have become our family, as far as Christmas celebrations go. (I mean, they are our family at other times, too, but... oh, you know what I mean.) And I feel bad that I was sort of giving them short shrift. On the other hand, I gave them all really nice presents!! They probably didn't care at all, it's probably just me doing my usual guilt thing. I am really good at guilt.

And hey, we were going to Vegas! We did have an excuse! So here's some pictures of both phases of things:

( Pictures over here... )

(The whole Vegas set is here - it's actually pictures from all three of my trips there, but the bulk of them are from last year.)