A day well spent

Today was wonderful!  I woke up to my sister getting ready to head on over to our friend Nick's house, to help him decorate his Christmas tree, so of course I decided that I wanted to join in the fun!  Last night and today heralded the true arrival of Winter for this area, as we got our first real snowstorm of the season!!  We've had about 25 centimeters (or about 10 inches) of snow fall in the last day (and it's still falling as I write this!), and as we headed out the door this early afternoon, it was simply gorgeous!  Lovely snow swirling everywhere.  We walked happily, singing Christmas songs, and being very happy that we could enjoy so much snow without putting up with so much cold (the coldest it's gotten today was -5C.  For most of the day it was even warmer!).

Once at Nick's house, we set to work decorating the tree...If something that's so much fun can even be called "work". :-)












I am a total sucker for reflective ornaments.  I can't resist taking a ton of pictures of them!



"Look! All three of us are in this one!"

 


We had a brief hot chocolate break, and then continued with the tree decorating (while struggling with the two very inquisitive dogs who are VERY good at getting in the way, and seem strangely attracted to the most breakable ornaments...). 





We even decorated the rest of Nick's house with ribbons!



Then, once we were done with all of our that, we surveyed our finished work...



The three proud decorators, me, Nick, and Emi. :-)

After a (fairly large considering it was nearing supper time) snack, we settled down to watch a favourite Christmas movie from Emi and my childhood, The Muppet Christmas Carol.

We couldn't finish it before supper, so Emi and I headed back through the snowy wonderland (well, the mostly wonderland.  We did have to move into a driveway to avoid a snowplow at one point, who, though we were in plain sight and had not just popped up in front of him, showed no signs of either veering to avoid us or slowing down.  A very common occurrence with snowplows around here...) for a (very quick) supper of homemade lentil soup.  I uploaded my photos from the afternoon, then we headed back over to Nick's house, where we were joined by Trev as well for the remainder of the movie.

When we finished the movie it was still snowing, and looked simply lovely from the window, so there were no complaints from anyone when Nick decided he wanted to go play outside in the snow.  We had a snowball fight, ran around in the middle of the streets (one of my favourite things about snowstorms is how few cars are on the roads), and decided to venture into the woods.  And that was beautiful.  So beautiful!  Even though darkness had fallen a while ago, it was still very easy to make our way through the trees, since the reflection of light from the crisp white snow made it almost as bright as dusk.  Sound is even more muffled after a snowfall in the woods than it is on the streets, and it felt almost holy...  I was sad when we had to head back towards a warm house when Emi's feet started to get too cold.

After getting warmed up with some hot chocolate and cookies, I was still quite happy to head outside yet again for the walk home, despite a bit of wet clothing...  I just adore the first real snowfall of the season!

All in all, it was a day very well spent.

Peace,

Idzie