The Christmas Photo.....

Still no camera - aaarrrggghhh!!! So we took advantage of the use of Grandad's camera (and his garden) to take this year's Christmas Card Photo:


The thing about the digital camera is that now everybody gets the same photo. In days gone by (I've sent one out every year bar one since A11 was A4months), I took a 36-exposure roll of film and got it printed 4 times, and people who knew each other used to compare who got what photo (I know - imagine that! A WHOLE ROLL! And 36!! exposures, no less! In "those days", that was a lot of photo's for 1 sitting. These days, that's nothing in this house of 2,000 photos a month. Anyway, here are some of the culled shots from this year:




We live in a 250 acre pine forest and again this year we paid $50 for a pine tree! We spent ages at the Xmas Tree Farm picking out one with a nice full shape, making sure it was a tall one because we have high ceilings, stuffed it in the car with the kids either side of it, because it took up the entire length of the van, grabbed some rocks from the retaining wall down the road (we'll put them back when we're finished), dragged the thing inside and put it in the bucket of water straight away, complete with a couple of disprin just like the lady told us to, decorated it, taped strings of lights round the lounge and the tree, sat round and admired it all before we went to bed, all glassy eyed and filled with the good feelings of Christmas - then got woken up with a hell of a shock at 1am when the bloody thing fell over, smashing the new decorations, ripping the lights off the wall, soaking the presents under the tree as the 20 litres of water spilled everywhere and made a great hua of a mess! The tree is back up, the lights are re-taped, and the presents have been dried off but we didn't have the same enthusiasm second time round, so it's a bit slap happy:


Happy Birthday Poppa xoxoxo