This holiday season was more about receiving than giving. We spent Thanksgiving mooching off a friend’s family. Their lavish traditional dinner of turkey, gizzard stuffing, sour cream mashed potatoes, squash souffle, pumpkin soup, and a variety of homemade pies was accompanied by a large helping of Trivial Pursuit. Not having played this game since elementary school, the experience rekindled my fear of openly revealing my ignorance – like brain-storming the location of the “Haversian Canals” on the world map, only to realize that they were in the human body. My parents also came up to Boston to spend the rest of the weekend with us. We celebrated my dad’s birthday at B&G Oysters, caught up on a few episodes of Life, and did some holiday shopping at Wrentham. Our main holiday purchases this year, however, were a bunch of computer components to revamp our two desktop computer systems at home. Suddenly, the base of our Christmas tree became populated by processor, motherboard, RAM, and hard drives. I’ll be looking forward to some hardcore hardware handling while Melody heads to the West coast to visit her family next week. Add to that a huge carton of my favorite chocolates courtesy of my favorite deal site, and it’ll truly begin to look a lot like Christmas!