I keep hearing and seeing people grumble about this Holiday season. Between the economy sucking everyone’s spare change away and Snowpocalypse 2008 (that Flickr set is now updated with the rest of my snow photos, by the way) burying the entire Northwest coast under more snow than has been seen in a decade (or more), it seems like nobody’s happy.

Well, just to buck the trend, we’re not doing too badly here. It’s actually been a very nice Christmas this year. Not that these things didn’t affect us — we had to scale back on our presents a little bit, I lost a couple day’s worth of pay from work on days when we shut down, and Prairie’s been going a bit stir crazy from being cooped up in the apartment (the school’s on its winter break, so she’s not working, and she let me use the car to get to and from work, as my Alaskan-trained driving skills — mad skillz — served me well) — but it certainly hasn’t been the WORST. CHRISTMAS. EVAR. that it seems to have ended up being for many.

When we decided not to go for the HDTV, that freed up a chunk of budget for presents. So, we got a couple “big” things (I got a new stereo, so that when we do replace the TV, we’ve got a stereo that can handle the HDMI switching and all that gibberish; Prairie got a very pretty new shiny to wear) that didn’t add up to nearly as much as the TV would have been, then went to Goodwill and picked up a huge pile of books for each of us for right around $30. Once those were wrapped, plus a few other things we’d picked up here and there (dollar stores are great for silly little stocking stuffers, by the way), we had a huge pile of presents under our tree for around half of our original Christmas budget. Not bad!

Short sidenote: I love going digging for books at Goodwill. I’m a fan of sci-fi short story collections, and will pretty much grab ‘em when I see ‘em whenever we’re digging through cheap used book selections. This time, I found a real treasure: a 1958 edition of The Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy that includes a special section titled “Science-Fiction becomes Science-Fast—Sputnik and beyond” and on the back notes that it includes “A novelette called ‘The Fly’—one of the great horror stories of this or any other year…soon to be a great Twentieth Century-Fox picture in CinemaScope and color.” As much fun for the era it was published in as for the stories inside!

Prairie’s been on her winter break for almost two full weeks now. The company I work for gets really slow and pulls back to a skeleton crew over the holidays, and since I’m “just” the receptionist/admin assistant, I’m not part of that skeleton crew, so I get about a week and a half off of work, from the 25th through Jan. 5th. Lose a little pay, but it’s really nice to have a bit of a Christmas break! So we’re both enjoying having a little mini-vacation time.

I’ve got a couple projects lined up for my downtime: I’m going to try to get caught up on processing photos (I’ve got a fair chunk of stuff from October and November to get through), and Prairie and I are working our way through her shelves of books, adding them to the database and formally combining our collections. We’re at almost 1,000 books so far, and expect to be fairly easily somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 once everything in the house is entered in.

And that pretty much brings us up to date. Enjoy your holidays, everyone. We are!