Christmas Day! a very very cold day here in the land of the tundra. i think i ate more food today than i usually do in 3 days. ooof! i really like how the christmas festivities go down at M's Aunt C's. lots of food. lots of fun. and now that i'm part of the family, lots of prezzies! i feel bad about not getting decent gifties for people, but this year i think i did pretty well. especially because i forgot how much i had already gotten C, and ended up showering her with a crapload of gifts. i should have given M's mom N more, but i mixed up in my rememberance who i needed more gifts for. oh well, i think i did ok. and my last minute idea for M's cousin D and his fiancee T did pretty well also.

cool gift of the year: M got this hand carved wodden Noah's Ark. its really nice. all different kinds of wood, and the ark has little trays that the animals all fit into. its all hand done, the guy who makes em does fantastic work.

every year i manage to get C a gag gift that goes over really well. last year was 'night vision goggles' - she had been joking for a while that she needed night vision so she could keep a better eye out on the neighborhood. so i went to get her some of those glasses with flashlites on em. this year, she had said that she wanted those traffic cop flashlights - the ones that have blinking leds in the pole so they can direct traffic. i found these emergency flashlights at Target with the blinking leds... so into the cart they went. and she loved em.

cool gift runner up: these wonderful shadow story cards i got M from the Musuem of Fine Art. basically its childrens stories, but each page has a die cut picture that when you shine a flashlight on it, it projects the page's scene image onto the wall. Very nifty.

one big bummer about xmas with another family: you realize how you dont fit in. no matter how welcome you are, you're just not the same. doubly harder is not having a mate, and that also gets accented.

but i got nifty gifts, which i'll go on about another day.

gratuitous xmas snow shot taken by my dad today looking out from their house.