Pillage the Village

Some people have very touching Christmas traditions, involving Secret Santa's, doorbell ditching with warm treats or caroling to the neighbors. Our annual Christmas tradition is a little more unique/twisted. Every year, Barb sets up the Christmas Village, complete with a town hall, church, post office, school, and several villagers. It starts out looking quite traditional and delightful, like this:


As soon as Barb completes her rendition of the village, John always sneaks in with some powerful and destructive force that puts the entire village in peril. The first year he did it, Barb came home one day to find that the Millennial Falcon had landed in the middle of the village, and that Star Wars bounty hunters were holding several villagers at gunpoint. The year after that, the village was terrorized by famous Hollywood monsters, including Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman and The Mummy. Last year, the hapless villagers were captured and and plundered by a fierce band of pirates. So after surviving all that, Barb came home this year to find that the village had fallen victim to bloodthirsty pack of thought-to-be-extinct dinosaurs. Here's what our Christmas Village ended up looking like this year:




There you have it. Stay tuned to see what misfortunes will befall the villagers next year. Merry Christmas!

Snow Day!

Right on cue, December 1st arrived with the first real snow storm of the season. It was snowing when we woke up this morning and it kept coming down pretty much all day, until about 6:00 tonight. I love snow days, especially if they come on weekends when you don't have to drive in it unless you really want to. To celebrate the first Snow Day of the season, we slept in, made hot cocoa and popcorn, played Christmas music, shoveled the driveway (not necessarily a celebration), stocked up on groceries for the rest of the weekend, and rented a movie to watch at home tonight. Pretty much the perfect snow day :)

One of my favorite things about a good snowfall is how pretty the trees in the front yard look.

Ready to brave the snow and go shopping. John doesn't look as excited for the snow as Barb because he would rather be enjoying some tropical surf and warmer weather, but he'll survive.