You don’t know about those crazy English cardboard tubes with a small explosive charge that goes off when you pull the ends, and then, inside, is a paper crown, a lame toy, and a piece of paper with bad jokes on it?

That tube in the fancy red Christmas wrapping beside the fork is a cracker… although, sometimes, I call them poppers.

So everybody gets a cracker beside their place setting, and you all pull them with a loud pop… or crack… somewhere near the desert course… you know… after the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, but before the plum pudding… what, you don’t have that stuff either? I will try to explain more about English Christmas California style later… because we do it all over again tomorrow… it’s a long story, I will get to that too… but I am already falling behind on my Bay Area Christmas adventure, and I haven’t even shown you the presents I got, and it is already after dinner… I will have to do that tomorrow.

That’s what I got in my cracker this year… a tiny badminton set… the toys are getting worse.

That is what a plum pudding looks like… which is why we soak it in booze and set it on fire…

Sorry it is a bad picture… low lighting… it was dark… I will try to get a better picture tomorrow… I told you, we do the whole thing twice…

And there is my older daughter, Jessica… playing with the tiny rubber hands I got in my Christmas stocking… and there is Jason, the guy who is marrying her in less than four months… wondering if that is still a good idea…

Yeah, I can’t really explain a Browne family Christmas. Did I mention there is going to be about 18 people living at my mom’s house for the next few days? Try to keep up.