This weekend, the Admiral Emeritus and his wife came out to visit for Christmas, and we did (most of) our gift exchange last night, but first we had to put up the tree. Here’s a clip from his video, where my two granddaughters help me put it together, and we had a little fun with the rather sparse start to its assembly. You can see the Little Admiral and the Little Scribe in this clip. Glimpses of the DIL and the Mathemagician can also be seen, and my son looks like he’s sitting in a box when he’s actually sitting on the stairs behind it, trying to keep the youngest granddaughter from slipping through the rails and down the stairs:

I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails asking about the First Mate after her hospitalization for septicemia after Thanksgiving. She’s doing better, but sometimes not quite as well as she thinks. After doing a lot of Christmas shopping, she exhausted herself and had a down day today. She’ll get stronger over the next few weeks, and we’re fortunate that things didn’t get worse before she went into the hospital. She and I thank you all for your prayers and kind thoughts, and wish you all a happy Christmas season … and a better looking tree than this.