The Most Painful Day of the Year

That's how Bryn and Luke referred to Christmas Eve. Luke in particular was just beside himself with excitement about Christmas, and had been all month. We needed to get out of the house, so we checked out a 15-minute show in the lobby of the new Comcast headquarters. When you're in the lobby, you don't realize at first that the "wood" panels above the elevator banks are actually television screens. Sometimes the digital show spanned more than one panel:
and at other times, the demarkations between and among the screens disappeared, and it looked as though you were watching something on a movie screen. Bryn and I were both impressed by the show, which incorporated snippets ranging from the Nutcracker to a sleigh ride through snowy woods, but Luke was disinterested until the very end when snow machines rained fake snow down onto everyone in the lobby. That took us by surprise and was a real thrill to experience. From there we went to Continental Midtown for lunch and then it was the kids' idea to stop at the Academy of Natural Sciences. Somehow the kids got through the day -- and managed to fall asleep at night, and sure enough, Santa came and even dropped some candy in the fireplace (see evidence below).