OUR DECEMBER

Honestly, our holiday photos get worse and more skimpy each year. I think it's because I get too tired to try to take better ones any more. But our December was good and we had a great Christmas. Our Christmases are a lot more quiet and low key as we get older.

We were thrilled that Shabree was here to celebrate Christmas with us this year. This was taken Christmas Eve. Garrett made me this fantastic owl house. He'd been making and putting up a lot of them this winter. This one that he made me has a plexiglass window in back. When you look inside, you can see the carpeting and a "God bless our home" sign over the front door. I love that!

Garrett and Ruth do a lot of vintage shopping and they found this "Hoss" hat from back in the day when Bonanza was the big thing - around the early 60's, I think. So they bought it for Mathieu and had it cleaned and refurbished, leaving the original hatband with the brand and all that intact. VERY cool!

Samantha was working on Christmas Eve, but Andrew and Lyric came. Lyric enjoyed the bows and wrappings as much as she did the toys.

I've really been getting a lot of enjoyment out of my windowside bird bath and bird feeder again. We've had lots of sparrows, of course, but also male and female cardinals, mockingbirds and my two favorites golden fronted woodpeckers and green jays. This is one of the green jays. Not a very good photo at all, though. Recently we had 4 of them at once in the feeder. I wish I would have gotten a photo of that.

Chuck had been seeing quite a few men on packed down bikes on the highway at one place or another heading south, looking like they were homeless. So one day he was at Papa's when one of them - Larry - stopped and they got to talking. So Larry came to stay at our cottage, down the road a bit from us, for a few days over Christmas. When he left, he was heading to Choke Canyon and from there to Corpus, I think. He was a really nice man and we enjoyed having him visit. This poor photo is one I took through the kitchen window when Larry was getting on his way again.