Boots on the Ground

It's St. Nicholas Day!  We had boots on the ground this morning, or at least boots in front of the fireplace, a few different shoes all filled with candies and other treats.  Jingle Bell was there with a special Christmas message of hope:  "YOUR FEET SMELL."  Yes, it was all done with good humor, because yes, Maddie got a boot filled with candies and goodies, a tradition of St. Nicholas Day.  No visit from Krampus last night, although we did watch another parade, or at least highlights from one on social media, just to show Uncle George and Brandon some of the crazy traditions of Europe.   You can see that they got shoes with candy in them too - along with Nana as well.  Everyone left their shoes at the fireplace, even me!  I got a really great treasure - some more specialized coffee from the company that made "Frog's Breath."  

They sort of skeletonize a franchise to go with the "Bones" theme, and as you can see above, their version of "A Christmas Story" is pretty fun.  There was also a Santa one that Mom got, and we'll have to try those soon.  But this morning we still had plenty of Frog's Breath left, so we had a few cups of that before heading off to work.

There was a pre-school play today that I got to Narrate - actually this was tonight, and that sort of dominated my own day, as I didn't expect this honor.  But a lot of people turned out for it, and it did turn out well.  The rest of the family was hanging out together and doing a few things around the house, some of them involving finances and so forth that I won't go into here, but the bottom line here is that some financial institutions are extremely frustrating to deal with.  On top of that, of course, there's Nana, who sort of added a incessant flavor to the process... Mom and Uncle George did not have a green morning there.

When I got home after another extremely foggy night, Maddie was doing math homework and the others were watching "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." on television.  Maddie and I were reading "Hogfather" before bed time of course, and we said our prayers too.  I'm not well at the moment, but hopefully things will improve.  We got to sleep tonight, quite tired! 

But one more note:  the true cost of the Twelve Days of Christmas is something we keep up with each year, watching the prices fluctuate, gradually going up and up each year, and today we checked in to see if there was much of an increase, and of course there's an increase because yes, everything is increasing in cost!  The partridge in a pear tree costs 25.8% more.  The turtledoves are 33.3% more.  The French hens are 25% more.  Those five gold rings are 39.1% more.  The six geese-a-laying are 9.1% more.  Nine ladies dancing?  10% more. Ten Lords a Leaping?  24.2% higher cost.  Those eleven pipers piping are only 2.6% more costly than last year, as are the drummers drumming.  Only the swans and the maids-a-milking remained the same in cost, but on average, the entire collection is actually 10.5% higher in cost than last year, a grand total of $45,523.27.  Not that anyone with any sense of frugality would consider purchasing all these items for someone for Christmas.  But wow, those Twelve Days of Christmas had a pretty good jump the last two years!  Of course, so has everything else, and perhaps this is all the new norm.  We'll see, but currently there's not too much hope for anything different.  The old adage about doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results seems fairly applicable here.  Anyway, that's always a neat visit to a particular site to see about the updated cost of all those items, and it's always made a little fun, despite the obvious fact that everything this year is in fact costing more than it ever did before.

"Thanos was right."  Here's one of Maddie's latest characters that she gets each day with her Marvel Pop Advent calendar.  All the other ones were gingerbread characters or even a Captain America snowman.  But this Thanos was a puzzle to us for a little bit, that is, until we looked super close and saw that he was wearing a Christmas sweater!  

We'll do a group shot of these when she's got them all opened.  We're only a few days in, but this one has been pretty fun.  All the advent calendars are lots of fun, all leading up to the big day coming soon!