A quick recap of Christmas

Over the last couple of years I've made it a habit of recapping Christmases, namely the gifts that were received, since I'm assuming that's what most people want to see. This year's recap will be slightly different in that I'm not going to be showing everything, nor will I be going into any great details about any of the particular items. There's no real reason for this, other than I just didn't want this to be one of my usual unintentionally long rambly posts, hopefully it'll still be worth a scroll though.

This year was pretty much identical to the previous two year's, open presents/celebrate my mom's birthday in the morning, have lunch, and then go for a hike in the afternoon. After many of years of doing things on different schedules, this recent trend has really been quite nice, and in my mind, has made for the perfect way to celebrate my mom's birthday/Christmas.

If you've been with me for the last couple of years, seeing that I got a new pair of slippers for Christmas shouldn't be too surprising, this is a tradition that has been going on for the last fifteen years or so... one that I hope never ends! Slippers and I seem to have a love/hate relationship, I love them, and they reward my love by starting to fall apart sometime during the summer, and this year was no exception:

Usually by the time Christmas rolls around both slippers are being held together by duct tape, this year though was a bit of an anomaly, in that the left slipper was able to stay intact (mostly). The right slipper however, did what they always do, thank goodness for the tape, otherwise I would've been walking around for the last couple of months with about 1/3 of the bottom missing :)

I have an awful lot of Peanuts ornaments, most, if not all of them, have been given to me by my mom. Every time I think that there can't possibly be anymore out there, she finds another one -- and full disclosure, this was the third different one that she has gotten me this year, I was given the other two about a month ago.

I may be an old man, but I still get plenty of toys for Christmas (although this is the only one that I took a picture of).

Since my picture kind of sucks, and I haven't taken him out of the box yet (I will), here's a picture of the Mutant Spawn that I swiped from Google.

Even as a kid I rarely got cards for Christmas, I mean I probably could have got some had I asked for them, but I never did, my Christmas lists were always made up of nothing but toys and video games. It's only been in the last couple of years that I've started receiving cards, usually just in the form of a single or two, which is alright, but even as an adult I still don't really want any cards for Christmas -- that being said, this rack pack of 2015 Prizm football should be a fun open.

This is like fifth year in a row now that my mom has been able to add to my very humble little library of airship books. It'll probably be awhile before I get to it, but this should make for a very good read. As a slightly extra added bonus, this copy is signed by the author, which doesn't matter too much to me, but I guess it's still kind of neat.

I don't know if anyone not named Billy will care or not, but here's the synopsis anyway.

The presents were great, but it's the Christmas hike that I was looking forward to the most, and it did not disappoint... not that I thought it would though.

Three Christmases ago, right after opening presents, my mom just out of the blue suggested going for a hike later in the afternoon, seeing as how it is her birthday -- and I'm almost always up for romping around in the woods -- I certainly wasn't going to say no. Whether she knew it or not at the time, a new tradition was being started, another one that I hope never ends!

We never go anywhere fancy, sure, it would be nice to go somewhere with breathtaking views and all that, but neither me nor my mom is interested in driving in hour or two to get to such a location, so we keep it local.

It was about 40 degrees with sun and blue sky, s maybe other than it being few degrees warmer, we really couldn't have asked for a better day to be out.

My young inner self is was trying to convince me to climb up on the downed trees and walk across them, older real me had to be the voice of reason and remind young me that we still have broken toe that hasn't fully healed after almost three months, and that if something got broke were we (me and my inner self) to fall off of said tree, who knows if it'' ever properly heal.

This is why I don't need to travel anywhere fancy to hike, because I can be impressed, and awed by nature things just about anywhere. It's kind of hard to tell, but that little bit of white showing on the bottom lower right of this stone is a tiny piece of quartz. I thought that the moss pattern was pretty neat too. I'm not gonna lie, I wanted to take this home, but it probably weighed around twenty pounds, and I didn't want to have to carry it around for the rest of the afternoon (we weren't even halfway done yet).

Here's what happens when you try to take a picture with the sun shining practically right in your face. The picture didn't turn out as I had hoped, but I still kind of like it.

Remember what I said about being impressed by nature things just about anywhere? Here's a perfect example of what I'm talking about, this elm has pushed up, and around, a fairly large piece of stone (it's all one piece), and it was pretty darn cool to see.

Overall we spent 2 1/2 hours traversing I don't know how many miles, saw some neat stuff, got plenty of fresh air, and got plenty of exercise, one can't really ask for too much more than that on any given day, let alone Christmas day. I very much hope that everyone else had as good of a day as I did, and got to spend some quality time with their family... as I certainly did!


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.