After spending the few days leading up to Christmas in Washington, DC, we were ready to head out of town for an old-fashioned country Christmas. We changed into jeans, switched from cognac to beer and started saying "ya'll" a lot. Well, ok, we were already wearing jeans and we didn't actually say y'all out loud, but my parents did convince my son to pronounce "tired" as "tard". And he has been saying it that way ever since (thanks sooooooooooo much guys).
Anyhow, we headed to my parents house which is near Lexington, Virginia, deep in the heart of the Shennandoah valley. If you want to see what their lovely farm looks like when it is sunny and warm you will have to look elsewhere because it was most assuredly not sunny and warm this Christmas. I acknowledge that after living in Phoenix for 10 years I am officially a wimp, but really people, it was so cold and windy it made my eyeballs hurt. My eyeballs did not enjoy that.
We did discover one "country Christmas" fact, though, that I'm sure ya'll in the country have known for a long time. Farm with rolling hills + snow = instant sledding opportunity. As you may recall from numerous prior entries on this blog, my parents would never condone any sporty activity that even remotely looked like a real sport, so normal sledding was out of the question. Instead, they suggested boogie boarding down one of the hills on their farm. Here is my daughter demonstrating.
Yes, it looks a little like sledding but since boogie boards are made of light styrofoam and are designed for body surfing in waves, there were some unintended consequences. One was that it was difficult to get going, which required either a lot of pushing off, or for mom (that would be me) to to run in front of the sled pulling that leash. I'm confident that I didn't look at all ridiculous doing that. Here was an example of the pushing off.
Going nowhere fast.
Another consequence was that since the boogie boards weren't very slippery, they'd tend to come to an abrupt halt upon hitting anything that wasn't snow, like one too many patches of grass, resulting in a variety of wipeouts ranging from the mundate to the spectacular. They could have used some of that non-nutritive cereal varnish. [Can you name that movie?]
My nephew, Austin, definitely embraces the family tradition of hybrid made up sports. Allow me to present boogie board snow skiing:
Look out for that blade of grass!
My sister did bring along an official sled, so there was some honest-to-goodness sledding that occurred as well.
Just don't tell the grandparents about that last part.