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Merry Christmas! I thoroughly enjoyed the holiday season this year and I feel the need to record it. Christmas always feels so nostalgic for me and I have so many great memories, but I always regret not recording them, so the following is a detailed account of the past 2 days. Plus I feel like nostalgia is a main driver for the revival of old web aesthetics, so I think my stories and memories will be perfectly portrayed in my blog. Hopefully anyone who reads this, including my future self, will enjoy it!
I woke up pretty early today (around 8 am) to take part in one of my favorite family traditions. I went with my family to a nearby grocery store to pick up food for Christmas day. On Christmas day, we have a tradition of having stuffed crepes in the morning and then making sandwiches with deli meat and cheese for lunch and dinner. It’s not super flashy, but I cherish it nonetheless! Plus the store we typically go to has such a beautiful view of the mountains.
View of the sky and mountians
"ONE DOZEN ASS DONUT"
Unfortunately we barely had any snow this year which is a bummer seeing as the area where I live is prone to droughts, but today was still a beautiful overcast day! I decided to get the new Baja Blast tropical lime soda and try it out. It was good, but it honestly just tasted like normal Baja Blast to me.
The bottle in question
After grabbing all our food, my dad, my sisters, and I decided to do some last-minute stocking-stuffer shopping at our local Chinatown supermarket. I love shopping here and their prices aren't too bad, plus it was decorated so festively!
Cute decor!
I ended up getting my sister lots of candy, snack cakes, ramen, and mochi. My sister and I also decided to stop at Walmart to do some quick last-minute shopping. We then chilled at home for a bit and I had a lunch of eggs and toast with salsa, and I played a bit of Pokemon Moon on my 3DS.
When 12:30 rolled around, my sister had to go do some volunteer work at our local aviary so I decided to join her and look at some birds. I absolutely love coming here and seeing their precious feathered babies! I walked around and looked at the wide array of captive birds they have and it made me just so happy! I’ll have to write a whole other blog post about this aviary because I have so much to say about it, but for now enjoy these bird pics I took:
Bird madness!!!
The aviary is nestled within a park and it’s just so gorgeous so I had to take pics of the scenery as well as the non-captive wildlife I saw including squirrels and lots of small birds. Due to the large amount of wild birds I was seeing, I decided to start an ebird checklist (please check out ebird!) and I saw 10 species within 2 hours; these include lesser goldfinches, song sparrows, spotted towhees, downy woodpeckers, black-capped chickadees, northern flickers, mallards, dark-eyed juncos, and American goldfinches. I also submitted the spotted towhee and the Eastern fox squirrel to iNaturalist.
After the aviary, I joined my boyfriend and his family for dinner and it was absolutely delicious! We also did some gift exchanging and then I headed home around 8 PM. My twin sister and I watched a bit of Home Alone 2 and I took a very brief nap. I then played some Super Mario 64 and was able to finally complete it with 120 stars! My sisters and brother-in-law usually have a tradition of playing Overcooked on Christmas Eve night, so we played until around 2 AM.
Slept in a bit, but I ended up waking up around 11:00 to exchange gifts with my family! We unfortunately didn’t have a white Christmas but that was to be expected. We exchanged gifts for a couple of hours and then around 1 PM we had crepes with nutella, fruit, and cream. After I ended up taking a nap for several hours, and we then had a dinner of deli sandwiches, chips, and salad.
One of my sisters received the board game Wingspan from my other sister, so we both learned how to play it and ended up playing for a couple of hours. I’ve always wanted to try this game but I was not expecting it to be as fun as it is! You basically have to build your own aviary and it includes almost 200 cards with individual bird species.
Towards the end of the night, I played some more Pokemon Moon in bed and that concludes my Christmas! I quite enjoyed the holidays this year. It is true that it never feels quite as magical as it did as a child, but being an adult now I realized just how much I love to give meaningful gifts. Speaking of gifts, below are some of the gifts I received; I hope this doesn’t come across as braggy or entitled, I recognize that I’m extremely privileged to receive the gifts that I did.
The Xenoblade trilogy from my boyfriend!
A bug pinning kit from my older sister!
A Zhu Zhu pet from my twin! Iused to own so many of these as a kid so this was very nostalgic!
My twin also crocheted me this pelican, my favorite bird!
Rosalina's storybook from Super Mario Galaxy! Also from my boyfriend!
All the gifts this year, very yellow! My parents also got us some chairs for our game room!
Welp that’s it for this year! I’m hoping to start writing more blog posts about holidays and important events in the future for archival purposes. Even though there’s so much mindless consumerism during the holidays with companies screaming at us to spend as much money as possible, the Christmas season holds a special place in my heart and is filled with feelings of nostalgia and child-like excitement, and I hope my blog post can convey at least a little bit of that.
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