I LOVE Boxing Day!!! After the effort to make Christmas Eve as elegant and fun as it has always been - downsized a wee bit this year, no soup course, and my husband and daughter really pitched in - and helping out with Christmas Day brunch and dinner, I'm so happy to wake up Boxing Day morning and there's nothing I have to do! The house is chaos with presents, stray wrapping paper and packaging, half-empty bottles and chocolates put out of reach of the dog. It's wonderful.

My husband and I gave each other a digital camera for Christmas - 40 pages of instructions for all the things he wants to do, and a point-and-shoot setting plus an "image stabilizer" to compensate for the tremor for me. Our kids, who are all excellent photographers, thought we'd picked out a really good one, and had put nearly 300 pictures on it by last night. I guess that's a compliment to our research!