My Christmas wish list

    Do you remember waking up really early on Christmas to open gifts?  

    In my family the first one up would yell "It's Christmas! It's Christmas!!!"  And we would (the children) rush though the hall (not looking at the gifts) run up and jump on Mom and Dad's bed, wake them up and beg to go open presents.  After a few seconds of "Wait, don't we need a camera, and it's too early" we would all head to the living room where the biggest gifts stood unwrapped.  The stockings, bulgy and overstuffed, were first Dad always love to put oranges and nuts to make them fatter but they had small gifts like lip gloss, toy cars, yo-yos, and gum (and that one year, toothbrushes).   Then we would fly to the gifts under our real live Christmas pine, and the accumulation of wrapping paper was enough to make one kill the proverbial goose!

My sister and I Christmas eve, the mound of presents wrap around our live tree.  About 3yrs. ago.

    Now there are five of us children so if you count at least three gifts per child, plus two each from Grandma Ruth and Pampo (More if they were here), and one from Grandma and Grandpa (unless we were there), and now that we are a bit older we add four more, one from each sibling.
This is a minimum of fifty presents under the tree, not including our "To Mom and/or Dad" presents.  :)
I love my large family!

    In those in between moments from unwrapping/clean-up to breakfast, Dad reads the Christmas Story from the Bible, and if there is time and snow we would play with our new sleds (always a gift) and come in soaking wet and hungry.

Last year, we built a snow man even bigger then the little one on top of shoulders! 

   When we can, we go to Grandma and Grandpa's house usually after we have our own Christmas.
That, is what we are doing today.  We have moved several (in my opinion) times, and once lived five blocks from Grandma and Grandpa, since we now live 9hrs. away it's harder to figure out when to travel and when to squeeze our own Christmas in.

  The plan: Leave around 9am today (I don't see that happening, "around" is more like it) travel to Grandma's house, unload presents and then we will stay at my Aunt and Uncle's house.

   I can't wait to see everyone (and to end the car ride) my father is one of five children, and I have over 20 first cousins, a few cousin-in-laws (?), and some cousin's kids.  Not sure of the final family count, but it's large.

My Christmas wish list this year???

(note: all big items I've gotten for my Birthday)

1.  iPhone cover for... well my iPhone. :)

This one would be fantabulus!

2.   Scarves. Any kind.

3.  Jewelry.  Any kind. (again)

Owls could hurt either. 

4.  Would be clothing, but I just got some amazing new stuff at Cato so I'm good here. 

5.   Anything involving baking.   :)

Really love baking

6.  Hats!!!  (the uber fancy kind)

I have yet to see this one under my tree.  :) 

And my outrageous wish list might as well go online... just for fun.

Ice skates

Red hair

Gloves (the long kind)

Dresses

College money!!!

More ideas

(huh, I was sure I had a longer list... I guess I'm getting older.)

  Whatever your Christmas plans may be this week/whole month, I pray you remember the real reason for the season amidst all the gifts and family.

First Snow

There are probably several things that appear more magical then the first snow. . .  nothing comes to mind though.


Before the cold forces me to dive under my covers with only my computer cord poking out, let me spin a yarn for you.


What if I told you my Father is a world class spy?  That he travels the world in search of one item.

My father undercover in Greece. 

In fact there are dozens of operatives that for years have been looking for one thing.  A white swan.  Yes, you heard me, a swan.  So that's where taxpayers dollars are going are they? Well, it's more then just an ordinary swan.  This swan (object 784C8D03,  I call it ducky) was...  let me make sure your educated enough to process what I'm going to tell you.  Have you seen a carrier pigeon?

Yeah something like that, and I've heard my Dad's old informant talking about modernizing the operation, you'd have to go to this link to see for yourself.
Bird brain tech

When you want to keep a secret, a deep secret, you ditch the well know pigeon idea and you might have guessed, use a swan.  Very undercover!  Then your only "fail" in the plan is that swans are harder to train.

Luckily, they know a guy ("they" is a secret, and "guy" is also privy info).
Lucky for the bad guys that is,  double agents are always a risk to your operation.  Rats!

I have been wanting to get some action in this swan case.  I know where the swan is.
In my own backyard! :)  I feed it bread just the other day, everyone's looking and I've found Ducky.

And Ducky found a swan too!

(Note:  To all playing The Musick game,  If you tell me "I've found ducky," I'll tell you my clue.)