Seeing Santa

I like Christmas and all, but one place we like to try to avoid around this time of year is the mall, especially the mall Santa.  I'm not trying to be a Scrooge, I just don't do crowds well and Stevie doesn't do screaming, misbehaving kids well.  So when I saw that our local market was going to be hosting Santa on Monday night, I marked my calendar.  Turns out, the local fire station has Santa ride on one of its trucks and goes through the neighborhoods passing out candy canes and saying hello.  The market was just one of his stops for the night.

I think the kids were a little nervous around the flashing lights and sirens because they just kind of posed for a picture and then were done.

Emmy telling Santa what she wants for Christmas.

I had just picked the kids up from basketball and cheer - that's why London is in shorts!

This is the lead vehicle for the fire truck parade.

Tree Lighting and Nativity

Saturday was Gig Harbor's tree lighting ceremony and despite the frigid temperatures (in the 20s which is cold for here), we bundled up and headed out the door.

Santa comes down the main street on a fire truck.

Then goes to the pavilion, leads a count down, and - poof! - the tree is lit.

Now here's a rare shot - two of my kids hugging!

After the tree lighting, Stevie and Charles went out for a brotherly dinner and the kids and I left to go home.  Except I thought that while I had everyone bundled up, we could run past a live nativity scene that I had read about.

Any live nativity scene that I have ever scene usually entails a recreation of the manger scene with some people, a baby doll Jesus and maybe a donkey or a sheep or two.  This one was very different!  It was set up like you were entering Bethlehem with a full blown market place, stalls, tents, animals, Roman guards, etc.  It was really well done and very educational.

Emmy getting her hand decorated like the women did when they came to town for a festival.

A frozen Cannon in the market place.

London with the Roman guard.

At the very end of the trail was the manger scene (yes, that's a live baby Jesus).

Charles, Carlos and Diana

As I mentioned in another post, Carlos, Diana and Charles were able to join us for Thanksgiving this year.  They stayed for a week and we had some good time together.  Besides helping us decorate for Christmas, we had some outings in Gig Harbor and in Seattle.  We also had fun hanging around the house playing games, talking and eating good meals.  Thanks for visiting us!

It was a little cold when we stopped at this park for a view of the bridge.

Finishing off the meal with Diana's chocolate cream pie

Reading stories

In Gig Harbor

A Bad Break

Friday, Stevie was post call and wanted to do something fun with his brother, Charles.  So he found a fish hatcherie and salmon run for them to go see.  This is the time of year that the salmon "run" or swim back up stream to lay their eggs and it's a pretty fantastic feat of nature to watch.  We went with my sister and her family last year to a place near Olympia, but this place was much closer.

By all accounts, they were having a great time watching the fish and the fishermen, until Stevie slipped on an icy patch of ground and went - BOOM - strait down on his wrist.  I knew it was bad when Charles called me to say they were on their way to the hospital to get an x-ray.  Stevie does not do hospitals until things get really bad.

Sure enough, he has a radial head fracture in his right arm which won him a cast for three weeks and a free vacation from work until the end of the year!  Oh, man!

We were going to have "Daddy's famous hamburgers" that night for dinner, so Charles had to take over and be "directed" by the famous chef.

Decorating the tree

Although we got the tree on Friday, we waited until Stevie was home again on Sunday to decorate it.  Diana, Carlos, Charles, Stevie and I had gone out earlier in the day for a little Christmas shopping, but when we came home we got to work.  The kids are great helpers getting the decorations out and putting the ornaments on the tree.  Now Cannon is so tall, we don't have ornaments on the bottom half only!

Emmy trying to be a Christmas tree.

He never changes - that photo was from Kindergarten.

The finished product:

Tree-time

We were very fortunate to have Diana, Carlos and Charles come join us for Thanksgiving this year.  They flew in on Thanksgiving day since Stevie was on call that day anyways.  We had decided to celebrate Thanksgiving on Friday instead and then get our tree on Sunday since he would be on call on Saturday too.

Stevie came home from work on Friday morning to tell us that the weather forcast for Sunday was bad - a nasty wintry mix - so he suggested that we get our tree on Friday instead.  That threw a small clog in my wheel since I had Thanksgiving dinner to prepare, but we rallied and all got dressed, breakfast and out the door by 10:00.  Stevie had picked a tree farm about an hour away that sounded like a lot of fun.

The farm was huge and had quite the set up going with hot chocolate, cider, fire pits and even its own Christmas store.

Warming up with cider before we head out.

After some cocoa, we headed out to the fields to find the perfect tree.

This one?  No...

This one!!! (The one behind us, not in front.)  (Yes, even Mick helped us decide.)

Look!  That's me in a picture!!!

After selecting the perfect one, the men took over to get their yearly lumberjack fix.

Timber!

The kind folks at the tree farm helped us tie the thing on our roof since we don't have a roof rack and we had an hour's drive!  It stayed on, though, and we got back in time for me to cook the turkey and fixings and to celebrate Thanksgiving.

Nature pics from Washington

Sometimes the beauty of the world just makes me grab my camera and shoot a bunch of pics.  Hope you enjoy them.

We had a week of serious fog in October

Fall colors - caught this one before a horrific wind storm came through and blew all the leaves away

Sunrise

And then one night there was a ribbon of fog in the valley below our house that I tracked in a progression of pictures.