This is Zoe’s first Christmas, but Karen and I decided we should be a little pagan instead. We opened our gifts Friday, in celebration of the winter solstice. Ok, it was actually just a really good excuse to get to the gifts early! :)

Zoe got a lot of groovy stuff, including a fun castle and dolls set, an ocean-themed “drum kit” for infants (which is thankfully not too noisy; this will go nicely with the step-on piano from Grandma Barbara) and a greifball from Haba. Apparently, “greifball” is “gripping ball in German.

Of course, the “gift” she like most was the crinkly wrapping paper.

Amongst our other gifts, Karen and I ended up exchanging iPods: she gave me a new Shuffle and I gave her a 30GB video model. I guess we both figured that it our old ‘Pod wasn’t quite cutting it anymore. The shuffle is really groovy; it’s so small and yet it sounds pretty darn good.

It seems like it wasn’t that long ago that we were all drooling over the Walkman portable tape player. These days, that’s like saying you’re excited about the wheel.

I hope that any and all reading this have a great holiday season!

(P.S. I’ll post some pictures of the unwrapping soon.)

“We should go get our tree”, Karen said to me a few days ago. I don’t really have much X-mas spirit this year, mostly because I never do. So I kind of harrumphed, looked sour, and maybe even “bah, humbugged” when Karen announced that it was time to acquire our annual piney decoration. But I agreed that the time had indeed arrived, especially since this is Zoe’s first Christmas evah.

So we all jumped up (if one can be said to jump when packing an infant around is involved) and headed on over to Bonnie’s. This is a little local place on the other side of the park from our house. They’re basically open from some time in the spring until they sell their last Christmas tree. It’s a quick drive, so I didn’t have enough time to get into much of a “I hate tree-shopping” mode.

It turns out we could have walked over there. Karen decided at some point that even though she wanted a tree, it wasn’t going to be a very big one. And thus we ended up with a little fir that barely breaks the four foot mark. I swear that it weighs less than Zoe.

It was something of an adventure getting this sapling into our industrial-strength tree stand. In years past, we have taken advantage of our 20′+ ceiling when it came to trees; a couple of years ago, we had an eleven-footer.

I think this qualifies as the second shortest tree we’ve ever had; I seem to recall a rather portly little shrub we acquired for our minuscule apartment back in New York.

Zoe, as you can see, appears to be very interested.