Happy Hanukkah!

Why didn't anyone tell me before that Hanukkah is starting at sundown, 25 Dec this year? Hmmm? This is one of those once-in-a-lifetime exciting events! Hanukkah and Christmas on the same day!

I woke up at 10:30 this morning because the sun was kinda bright. Brightness is since gone, or maybe not- in any case, it was too light to sleep, but now I consider it way dim in here. I've never slept until 10:30 on Christmas before- this is very weird to me. I smelled food and decided to head down and seek out some breakfast, but it turned out I was smelling the turkey cooking (we were going to be übercool and have a goose, but we apparently came up with this idea too late and there were no more geese left- it's a nice big turkey, though). . . had some marzipan-based pastry thing for breakfast (yum) and made hot chocolate and confused the family by adding mini marshmallows (thanks Mom)- it was so delicious. I promise to teach these Germans about proper drinking of sugar-based warm liquids. Hung around watching Piff's Green Day DVD (I promise to make up for this by spending my Christmas money on delicious indie rock) and watching Philipp trying to figure out his new cell phone (a fancy one that will also work in America) and eating Plätzchen.

Christmas: good.

We ate our turkey and knödel and rotkraut and other yummies and we played a Nurenberg-based trivia game and it turns out that I know nothing about Nurenberg but Piff either knows even less than me or is worse at guessing (it's the second one) so I didn't even lose- I ended up with 2 more streets and one more house than him. Granted, everyone else who played (Anja, Eva, Philipp) managed to get the big center castle and at least 2 of the Sehenswürdigkeiten (I forget the English word for these) and a whole bunch of houses and streets, but still. Little victories. I've also put together a three-page list of things I want to buy from iTunes and I've gotten excited about box sets because they tend to be super-cheap (do you know that I can get 71 They Might Be Giants songs for $19.99? That is 28 cents a song, when they still cost 99 cents individually!) So now I'm just trying to figure out what proportion of my Christmas money can go to iTunes and which bit to H&M and also if it is worth buying speakers, because I don't know if my computer will let me use them or not (headphones don't work for reasons I don't understand, but the cd drive doesn't work, either, so this is part of my computer's special personality).