First of all, when I woke up I heard dripping outside the bedroom window. I thought for sure it was raining until I peeked through the curtains and saw a blanket of white across the entire neighborhood. Crazy, since it hardly snows here at all, and never, ever on Christmas, because that would just be too perfect.
And it was, and I was itching to take photos of it, but first we wanted to open gifts.
Just like when I was a kid, we start off gifts by opening our stockings. There were already a couple of awesome goodies peeking out of mine, like some fantastic lightsaber chopsticks.
And a Milka hazelnut bar. Darren always brings them back for me when he travels to Africa, but he hasn't been in a year or so and I was running out of my stash. Turns out you can order them from Amazon, too. :)
Darren (cheesing it up for the camera) got a case of Bounty bars, as per usual. They're also an overseas treat that I've learned can be ordered from Amazon.
And then we proceeded to open gits. I think I'm unwrapping the third season of Burn Notice here.
Another shot of the Milka bar, plus my nifty new TARDIS keychain.
And I also got a set of Star Wars sandwich cutters in an awesome lunch tin!!! The cutters are now in the kitchen, but the tin is being used for storage in my scrap room.
And then Darren proceeded to play with the cats with some of the discarded package trims...
While I played with the snow and Christmas lights outside with my camera.
I love the way the snow settled on the branches, and it was still coming down while I was shooting these!
I took an ornament outside to use as a bit of contrast.
I spent a good deal of the afternoon playing with my photos in Lightroom and blogging. At one point, though, Darren walked into my office to see what I was up to, and I suddenly wondered what Bridge Street looked like all covered in snow.
So he offered to drive me over there.
And it was gorgeous, too.
Someone had obviously been there before us (the movie theater was open, so not a huge surprise).
I'm guessing that some bored theater employees built these. :) They even used chopsticks from Monaco's sushi bar (seriously, we can get sushi at our movie theater) as arms. Too cute!
There was even a blanket of snow on the space shuttle.
The duck pond at UAH.
And then we went back home, packed up some clothes and gifts, and drove up to my parents' house so we could spend Christmas evening with them and get together with my family the next day.
But that's a story for another post...