Wordless Wednesday

A Very Merry Christmas

For Christmas I got a new scanner (we open presents on Christmas Eve since I have to work on Christmas). It has an attachment to scan slides and negatives. I started scanning tonight, beginning with a series of slides from my brother's birth. I'd tried scanning these slides before, to less than desirable results. This time, however, I was more than pleased with the results. Here are the results, with no editing on my part (aside from rotation):

And here's what I had before from a regular scanner:

Wordless Wednesday

The Christmas Bear Stocking (Advent Calendar - Day 18)

Every year for Christmas I've used the same stocking. It's a bear wearing a santa hat and red overalls. The overalls make up the storage area and can be filled front and back. His arms are curled up and create hooks to hang things from.

From what I understand, my mom went shopping with her mom when we were babies to pick out new stockings for all the kids. My mom picked out these stockings, but my grandmama didn't like them. She felt they weren't big enough. Grandmama was always looking out for her grandkids.

As I mentioned in my post about letters to Santa, when we were little we would hang our stocking on the hutch, as we had no fireplace. When we moved into our current house, we started hanging them on the fireplace mantle. Our Christmas list went into our stockings and Santa's Elves would come by and pick them up. On Christmas morning, our stockings would be full of candy and small toys. And I mean full!

Even after Santa stopped bringing us presents, he continued to fill our stockings. The photo on the right is of my stocking three years ago.

A few years back, we bought stocking for our parents. We try to put a few small things in them each year - though I've never done as good a stocking for them as they do for us.