A belated Christmas report

Yes, it's way after Christmas now, but I thought a late report was better than ignoring the Christmas season entirely. In fact, the lateness is typical of this year, in which I just posted my last Christmas cards day before yesterday! (The first I've sent in three years.)

This Christmas trip to Georgia was remarkable because it was the first time I'd ever seen snow on Christmas day. (This is because, even though we've lived in New York for over a decade, we've never spent Christmas in the city.) We were opening presents at my inlaws' house on Christmas morning when I noticed the first flakes. As soon as we'd finished with the presents, all the cousins ran outside to play in it.

The Christmas snow was a sticky snow, the only sort we ever have in Georgia, because for snow to occur there, it almost has to be too warm for it. But it's great for building! CZ and her cousins built a small snowman in the afternoon, but they only really got up to speed towards dusk when they started a huge igloo. This was impressive considering that the total snowfall was about 4".

At one point, CZ and her thirteen-year-old cousin M., a boy who is going through the extreme growth stage, tried in vain to move a huge snow block towards the igloo. CZ hacked at it with a pickaxe to try to reduce its weight, but they still couldn't pick it up. Then along comes M.'s eleven-year-old sister E., who easily rolls the now roundish block into place. Chalk up one for E.'s common sense!

The next day, I found these footprints on the upstairs deck. I immediately suspected who had made them, and I was right, it was she-who-wants-to-be-Nordic. I'll leave you to decide how much common sense is displayed in this photo.

Needless to say, the dogs were greatly amused by both the snow and the igloo. I watched the lab puppy jump exuberantly onto the frozen pond and crash right through. It didn't seem to faze her; she just jumped out and shook off a lot of cold water. I moved away just in time.

Here's Bob reporting on snowfall totals in New York via Blackberry, and relating how glad I should be not to be heading to Jamaica Bay on the A-Train.

This Christmas was also notable for being able to visit with a lot of Bob's cousins whom we hadn't seen in years. That's always fun, too. We used to do a lot of things with them, so we didn't want to lose touch just because we live in a different state now.

And whenever we weren't doing anything else in particular, we played games of Taboo, Apples to Apples, and Buzzword next to the almost continual fire Bob's parents had going in the kitchen/sitting room. No one in the family plays these games quite as they are intended, but we all think it's more fun that way. Apples to Apples sets up the most absurdities, especially when certain people judge.

I'll end with some photos of things that just seem particularly winter-in-Georgia to me. I don't expect anyone else to understand why they're special to me; they're just things that I miss, and that I don't see in New York. The last photo is of the afternoon sun streaming into the bedroom that we use at Bob's parents. It still has our old bed and framed picture in it. Neither bed nor picture made the move up thirteen years ago, because we slept on a sofabed for our first seven years in New York, and after that it was too much trouble to ship things up. The picture says, 'There's no place like home."

Our next stop, Athens, has a very different sort pictures, so I'll put them in another post.