home for the holidays

I hope you've had a merry Christmas by now!  We sure have.  This is our first Christmas at home.  Our very first married Christmas came just five days after our wedding--I'll post some memories of that soon.  This year we chose to be a pair of happy little orphans.  Families who feared we were staying because we couldn't swing our usual trip to see family lovingly offered to draw us into their festivities, but we opted to spend the day just us, just relaxing.  Ahhh....

We repeated my family's tradition of a snacky, prolonged lunch.  Growing up the fare usually included crackers and cheese, summer sausage, fruit, veggies, pickles, and cocktail bread.  There would always be some sort of sweet treats too, but I don't remember those necessarily being the same every year.  For our riff on it, we started with a pineapple that had been ripening on the counter.

In case you don't know, the pineapple is an old-fashioned sign of friendship and welcome. Welcome to our home!

Then we added all of this:

clockwise from lower left: goat cheese and crackers, little smokies, baby carrots, pineapple, bread & butter pickles

After all that, we lazed around, puttering at projects and watching episodes of "How I Met Your Mother."  Then we got out to enjoy a gorgeous afternoon.

We hiked a trail we'd never tried before.  I took some photos of the exercise stations scattered along the trailside.  I found them hilarious.  I mean, come on: horizontal ladder?

Any schoolkid could tell you the real name for that is monkey bars.  Am I right?

Of course I'm right.  I even swung (almost all the way) across for old times' sake.  The only station that was funnier than this was the highly implausible "scaling wall."  Check this out:

Easy, huh?  I had hubby stand in the photo so you can appreciate the full scale of the scaling wall.  You could spring over his head in a single bound, right?  I mean, the sign points out that, if you need to, you can use the provided step (which you can see on the left side, three planks up--right about at his thigh level).

Despite my skepticism about the workout options, I enjoyed the wintry views.  The light glaring through this fluffy weed enchanted me.  A similarly fascinating effect turned brownish grass a vivid orange where the the sun shone through, but it was too windy to photograph waving grass with my point-and-shoot camera!

When we climbed a hill, our view down over the town included this:

Most days lately I've seen geese on it, but not this afternoon.  Maybe it was too warm for them to sit clustered up doing nothing.  That's kind of the feeling we had today--it would have been a shame to stay in on a day this lovely.  How about you?  Were you snowed in?  Soaking up some sunshine?  Somewhere in between?  Wherever you were, I hope you enjoyed comfort and the company of loved ones.