I just celebrated my thirtieth Christmas1, which turned out to be my first white Christmas. It was quite magical—it started snowing around 9:30 am on Christmas day, while we were in the middle of opening presents, and it didn’t let up until about noon the next day. It snowed continuously and consistently, but never very hard, which created the softest snow I can remember. I’m sure it would make for great skiing.2 With the exception of not getting to see some of my relatives because of the weather, I’d rate this as one of the best Christmases of my life.
I have several pictures from our white Christmas in Newton, which are split into two albums: outdoor pictures and indoor pictures. While I was at it I also uploaded another set of photos from Thanksgiving that I still hadn’t loaded from my camera.
An interesting thing that happened is that my youngest brother, Jake, got the same present for Christmas this year that my other brother and I received for Christmas when he was about four weeks old: an NES. Well, technically, it is an NES-compatible device, that plays all the old NES cartridges.3 We had lots of fun playing the old games—I think we put in a good six hours over two days playing two-player Dr. Mario. We’re a lot more evenly matched in skill now than we were as kids, which makes it a lot more fun. We also broke out Duck Hunt, and Jake taught Emma how to play. Here, watch a video of it (and you might notice the snowfall outside too):
It’s really a testament to how timeless Nintendo’s old games are.
2 Or do you want icier, packed snow for skiing? I’ve only been skiing a handful of times, I really don’t know...
3 Apparently there was nothing wrong with the game cartridges, but the connector on the NES itself is what was made very cheaply and over time it wouldn’t connect with the cartridges completely. This lead to many notorious NES superstitions that didn’t really work—most famously blowing into the cartridges.