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.)