Christmas
Aside: this post has clearly been present since the indicated date, which could not possibly have been falsified or tampered with, since said date. Okay, actually I couldn't stand having it listed in the 'wrong' place chronologically.
This year was much better than last year for the family, in that the holiday was not overshadowed by health concerns. Both of my grandparents are in much better shape than they were a year ago, much to everyone's relief.
I was unfortunately not near as successful in thinking of and obtaining gifts for family members. As my brother and his friends have become moderately serious about shooting each other with nerf weaponry, I got him a reasonably nice gun that I doubted he would have bought for himself (which happily turned out to be the case) and a Sepulchritude t-shirt. I gave my dad a history of the Medicci, the last old Retief book I could find that I hadn't already given him, and a book on some the monarchs of major european powers leading up to WWII. For my mom I got a couple of Agatha Christie Poirot mysteries (Death of the Nile and Evil under the Sun, if I remember correctly) and a book on the history of fundamentalist religion in the United States. With the exception to the MSPA t-shirt I don't think I was terribly clever with any of these but they seemed to be fairly well received. I guess they at least had the advantage of being somewhat genuinely surprising due to their randomness.
The best things that I got were ones that I had requested: a copy of the (Red) Dragon Compiler book and the Gang of Four design patterns book. The latter is something that, like plays by Shakespeare, I didn't really consider myself sufficiently well rounded without having read seriously, even if it isn't really all that exciting. The compilers book is a lot more fun and interesting to me, as it's something I really want to learn more about, but can't really cover in the course of my official studies. While this specific book is rather old, but especially with my mostly self-taught background, I prefer to start with something fairly basic.