Christmas 2018 Preparations - Gift Wrapping -

Update - December 16 to December 22

Currier and Ives Display Homes 

-- Decorating the House

Patti and I have enjoyed celebrating Christmas differently this year. We used our vacation time to make some trips that allowed us to celebrate in a relaxed setting from Maine to Vermont. We also decorated differently this year. We brought out some of our holiday village pieces and created some vignettes throughout the house. Grandaughter Lucy has enjoyed seeing the villages and learning the difference between a toy and a decoration.
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READ my Blog "The Books of Richard F Wright" (Books, Bookstores, Writing)

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Snow Covered Roofs Create the Mood

-- Snow Makes it Festive

One of the things I like about the village pieces is the snow. When we went to Maine and Vermont we wanted to crunch through the snow as there really wasn't any on the ground in Jefferson. So, seeing the snow in the villages helps with the mood-setting.

-- Mac 'N Cheese is Always a Hit

Lucy and Mac 'N Cheese

Most four-year-olds have some fussy moments when it comes to eating and Lucy is no exception. There are times when I wonder if she's going to eat anything at all on a given visit. But, generally, if I make some Mac 'N Cheese I can get her interested in some lunch. I've learned that if I offer a small portion she's more likely to ask for more than if I offer a large portion; where she turns it away immediately and states she doesn't want it. The other thing that I have found helps with getting a full meal is to serve one item at a time. She might eat some ham or some other extra item, as long as I don't serve it on the same plate, or even at the same time. Maybe, it's just too overwhelming to have all the choices that slows her down.

-- Gift Wrapping and Christmas Movies

Equal Mix of Wrapped and Gift Bagged

My annual ritual is that if Patti is at work or at an "ornament" party with friends from the hospital, I find it a perfect time to wrap the Christmas gifts. To keep me in the mood I run Christmas movies and specials while I wrap gifts and drink eggnog. Hood eggnog is better than Big Y eggnog, but I can live with either. The Bacardi goes a long way to equalize between the two. My favorite wrapping technique is the gift bag, but to help the kids enjoy their "unwrapping" I use a traditional gift wrap to make it more fun to open the presents. For adult gifts, I prefer to use the tissue paper and gift bag. For the record, the stockings look great on the fireplace, but you really can't fit anything inside except a candy cane, so I don't bother.

So far we have watched A Christmas Story, A Christmas Carol, The Miracle on 34th Street, and Funny Farm. Now, I know you may not consider Funny Farm a Christmas movie, but we hadn't watched it for years and it was even more hilarious than ever as we had just spent a week in Vermont recently, enjoying the "country" life and the quirky people in towns like Woodstock, Quechee, and White River Junction. The movie reminded us of the scenes and people we had just visited so we got a lot of laughs out of the movie. You should try to see it again.

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Reading Update: On a visit to Cape Canaveral last year, 
Patti and I learned that NASA had made a decision to stop operating our shuttles and concentrate on landing on the planet Mars. This was a realistic approach adopted in view of the extreme expense each program represented. In effect, Congress said, "Pick One," but, you can't have both. So, it's on to Mars. The private sector will have to take over the local space travel to space stations and near-Earth orbit activity. By the way, on our last visit to Florida, we saw one of the Space X rockets floating on a barge after being recovered from the sea. 

I mention all this as a preface to my finishing a book by Andrew Mishkin, "Sojourner, An Insider's View of the Mars Pathfinder Mission." His book documents the effort it took during the 1990s to get a "rover" onto the surface of Mars in order to determine how we could eventually explore the Mars surface with astronauts. The book is a fascinating overview of how they did it and what it might mean for the efforts NASA is expending today to get to Mars.