Oh, *YUM* !!!

Baking time :)
Would it surprise you if I told you I was already thinking of putting up some kind of sleigh, either a real one in my front yard, or a linght string in the shape of a sleigh on the facade of my house? :)

Santa and/or reindeer included of course.

Nah, just kick the kid down the slide while telling him "you'll shoot your eye out, kid". :)

Santa agrees that Fireworks are awesome, but using weapons as fireworks is bad. He will, however, be lighting some (legal) fireworks in your name, come new year's eve.

He also left a present in your stocking.

It does smell wonderful, but there is actually a bit more to the tradition behind it. This tradition actually dates back to Medieval times. Clove was brought back from the holy lands and prized in many European courts. Medieval herbalists knew of its antiseptic properties and its ability to kill germs and dental pain. However the Christmas courtly tradition regarding this simple 'decorative pomander' was actually a courtly game of flirtation. Gentlemen would take a cloven orange and present it to a lady. If she accepted it, then the gentleman would bite a single clove from the orange to sweeten his breath, and claim a kiss. (Only bite the clove, never the orange - bad manners.) Afterwards, the lady would carry the orange with her flirtatiously, until she wished to bestow it on a gentleman and claim a kiss herself and pass the orange on to him. ;) It is still in practice today over the Twelve Nights of Christmas among the period Renaissance performance groups and historical societies in the USA. ;)

Thanks a lot, skimmie and PaterAlf! You are way too kind with this old pyroma... ahem, fireworks connoisseur!
I'll be sure to light a pyr-a christmas tree just for you!
With, like, electric light. Not fire. Definitely not that. Fire. Yes.

When i was a kid, decorating the christmas tree was a big thing. I even remember one year we bought those fake snow spray cans, since we surely don't have snowy christmas down here. And who forgets having to find out why some of the lights weren't blinking? =] Nowadays, with the fiber optics trees and LED lights, this process is way less stressful. Clark Griswoid surely approves.

Funnily enough what i miss the most is receiving letters and christmas cards from friends and relatives, since we used to put them under the tree as well. Most of my family is from Portugal, so it was quite exciting waiting for their letters and presents to arrive.

My wife is the oldest of ten kids. We are spending Christmas this year with most of her family. They have a tradition on Christmas Eve of creating a smorgasbord. Each family member contributes one dish. Then we video record the table and each person introducing their dish. Then we all eat.

Typical dishes include:
Puppy Chow - a sort of dessert made from rice cereal (Chex) and chocolate powder and marshmallows and stuff. It's quite honestly disgusting.
Shrimp cocktail - always there is someone late or lazy enough to just buy some chilled shrimp and some horseradish red sauce.
Pot Stickers - or Asian fried dumplings.
Egg Rolls - This is an every-year dish, and it is a day-long process. Shredding cabbage and other veggies, chopping and frying pork, mixing up a soy sauce-based sauce, preparing the wraps, rolling, and finally frying and serving with sauces.

I want to thank my Santa - Doc0075 for the game that I wanted for a long time. You made my day!

Well done! Santa thinks that was very nice and generous of you and your classmates. He left a gift in your stocking.

*cough Post 119 *cough* ;)

Thank you very much! Have a great Christmas and happy new year! :)

Some of them are typical for different regions in Poland (I believe #5 is from Łowicz), some of them are pretty old design (#4 an #1 in particular) but I cannot really recognize them all that well. ~2 years ago I tried to learn more about them but sadly there are not so many source materials.

One of the best presents I ever got was a rusty lathe circa 1950's or prior. A very close friend of the family gave me the old Atlas lathe he inherited because he had no interest, and It had been rotting since his father died and when his mother passed away it became his problem. Old enough to be made of low radiation steel unlike anything possible to make on Earth today, and steel was cheap back then so they didn't skimp on it. This was the same model the USA sent the British for the lend lease program during WW2 that they used to make mortar shells with. Between my love of building things and my love of fixing things a lathe in need of restoration was a wonderful gift. Replacing the broken transverse drive carriage, age rotted belts and wiring, missing parts then pulling the rust, hours of fun just making it spin up again for what was probably the first time in at least three decades. Still not complete, it at least now runs and is functional, indoors, and free of rust. Still, a good catalog to help identify the various tooling names would go a long way towards figuring out what fragments are machine parts from something else and what is specialty bitting.


I am interested in the GA.

I have a real cool story about Christmas spirit and non-material gifts. And it happened like an hour ago!

A secretary called me and said that someone was looking for me. A young woman was waiting for me in a parlor and she asked me if I knew who she was. Much to her surprise I did. A few years ago I organized a Christmas event and visited an orphanage to show some cool physical experiments like these (just a few examples):
Mousetrap Fission
Stylish balloon popping
Levitation is easy
Fire from above
and she had been asking me tons of questions back then so yeah, I did remember her. Much to my surprise she told me it had been exactly eleven years ago and she considered it to be a life-changing moment for her. She checked my publications record so she knew where I work and decided to visit me. Apparently mousetrap fission experiment was particularly important to her and so… she showed me her recently obtained PhD degree in elementary particle physics!

Best Christmas gift ever!