Tuesday, December 25, 2007

A Merry One


We got an entertaining amount of snow today.  At one point I was thinking sheesh, whoever set us up for a white Christmas really outdid themselves.  Big, fluffy (meaning the air was really warm) flakes quickly gathered up on the ground.  We played Jimmy Buffett (not the Christmas album) and danced to our favorite songs, watched Terminator (the boy got the DVD as a gift) and played Chinese checkers, which I haven't been able to do forever because we didn't have a board.  

I wish I wasn't such a poopyhead yesterday.  I wanted to run around and deliver presents.  Instead I moped until we had to leave in the early afternoon for my mom's for Christmas Eve stuff.  We ate good food and talked and shared gifts and did family stuff in the house I grew up in.  Which is all for the good, but now I have lots of gifts under the shrub that need to be with their families and aren't yet.  It's the forest of undelivered toys.  I've been a very naughty Santa this year.

Still, we had a very good family day.  The house is warm, and it's still white outside.  I have lots of good memories.  Big dogs playing in the snow.  Mint hot chocolate.  Duck dinner.  Rory and Orion chasing each other around the house.  Birds darting around the feeders.  The quiet as traffic slows down to nearly non-existent.  Festive fire in the upstairs fireplace, and a vanilla candle burning on the altar.  Cats chasing a laser pointer.  Eating breakfast at the table, all of us together at once.  We have it very good here, and I'm very thankful for that.




Snow on the deck.   


Juncos, chickadees, towhees and nuthatches
 are our primary visitors.  Nuthatches don't like chickadees and visa versa.  They avoid each other when possible, but sometimes they can't avoid a squabble.  I was surprised that I didn't see any scrub jays today.  

Something about the snow makes our birds particularly voracious.  We've had much colder days without this many birds showing up at the feeder.  When snow comes it must be much harder for them to find food on the ground, and that would make anyone frantic, even if the snow is very thin like it was today.

2 comments:

C.S. said...

Yep, that's how it is around our bird feeder right now too. We didn't get snow and doesn't seem that cold but it's as if half the birds have come from your snow-covered place and are pecking, eating, and squabbling over here.

Good to hear you had a better day.

C. Jane Reid said...

I'm sadly out of bird seed, but I did put out a new suet cake for the hungry little feathered piranhas.

Note to self: get more seed, the kind that doesn't turn into weeds.