{"id":2195,"date":"2009-12-26T18:55:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-26T23:55:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-03-27T21:21:29","modified_gmt":"2020-03-28T02:21:29","slug":"christmas-highlights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/2009\/12\/26\/christmas-highlights\/","title":{"rendered":"Christmas Highlights"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Once again, we were lucky to have the kids home for Christmas.  I definitely hadn&#8217;t been in the shopping mood, but the spirit was still there.  At the last minute I did some quick hunting, with mixed results, but I did have a few items.  When Debra and her Jonathan came over and Thomas woke up, I pulled out my santa&#8217;s sack,a big red bag I&#8217;d acquired a few years earlier and handed out my gifts.  &#8220;Because reducing my carbon footprint is so important to me,&#8221; I claimed with a straight face, &#8220;I&#8217;ve elected to do without wrapping paper.&#8221;  That got a chuckle, and no one seemed too upset with having the store boxes unadorned with instantly shredded paper. <\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>I got a few items; more than I&#8217;d hoped for, which was nothing in particular.  Jonathan, who had given me a toy robot spider last year, gave me a Star Wars toy, &#8220;The Force Trainer&#8221;.  It&#8217;s a simple brain-wave detector that you use to raise and lower a ball in a wind column.  It&#8217;s cute and several of us had fun sitting silently in the chair and making the ball move as desired by just thinking the right way.  Since there&#8217;s no real instruction other than to &#8220;concentrate&#8221;, it has a little learning curve.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Debra got another popular gift, a &#8220;Spinmarshmallow&#8221;.  It&#8217;s a motorized fork to spin a marshmallow as you hold it over the glowing coals in the fireplace.  It did a nice job producing evenly browned, toasted treats.  It was also a great excuse to sit up close to the warm fire on a cold day.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>We had a nice ham for dinner, with enough people to fill the chairs, and three dogs begging under the table.  The talk was recipes and memories of previous years.  Not a harsh word all day.  <\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>And I still have a whole pumpkin pie left.  I wish you all have as wonderful a Christmas.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Once again, we were lucky to have the kids home for Christmas. I definitely hadn&#8217;t been in the shopping mood, but the spirit was still there. At the last minute I did some quick hunting, with mixed results, but I did have a few items. When Debra and her Jonathan came over and Thomas woke&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/2009\/12\/26\/christmas-highlights\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Christmas Highlights<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[240,241,242],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4t90x-zp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2195"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2195"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2196,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2195\/revisions\/2196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}