"It's the most wonderful time of the year..."

Hello there people, Merry Christmas!
(and Happy new year too, cos we probably won't get round to doing another post...)

So we have finally had our first (perhaps last?) white christmas! We headed up to Squishy (more commonly known as Squamish, other than among my workmates) with another stranded kiwi couple, Suz...

and Bruce...
to their cousins house for a week.
Minus our family, christmas didn't quite feel super Christmasy, but we did have our Wii (a nintendo video game for those of you that are confused right now...) to keep us company... the boys were (seriously) up at 6am practicing their tennis swings to try and out do each other... I must admit I was up till 11pm one night playing myself... its addictive... really...

And there was our nz centrepiece - a pohutakawa to keep us company

And lots and lots of yummy food...

(please excuse exceedingly corny Christmas photos... like the one above...)
The neighbours made a reasonably good snowman... by Canadian standards. Bruce and Lance thought they could do better.... what started off as shovelling the drive-way ended up a 9ft snowman....
(take that Canadians!!)

and snowball fights...

and snowshoeing...
(its actually not as hard as Suz is making it look...)

Oddly enough, with all the snow in Vancouver - (the most for 40 years, although a friend tells me when he was here he was told it was the least snow in 40 years - so its been suggested that '40yrs' is a Canadian metaphor for just a really long time...) anyway there was a lot of snow, but oddly enough not at Whistler ski resort, with piddly amounts of about 74cm, (compared with 2m at the local Vancouver mountains to put it in perspective) enough to tempt people out and then to kill two of them by not having quite enough (seriously - one snowboarded into a boulder, the other skiied onto rocks)... so we skipped the snowboarding

Not sure what to say about this picture....apparently it is good for towing people out of snow... probably not much else. (can't help but get the feeling that it would roll over on its side at a slight bend in the road...)

Oh, incase you're wondering, we got snowboards from Santa for Christmas, and have been up at our local Grouse Mountain every week. Will post more about that soon.

Anyway, I hope you all had a merry old time. Most of you have been making us feel very jealous of the NZ summer by putting summery, beachy, pictures all over facebook etc..... just remember, your winter will come, and then we'll see who's laughing!! ((muaahh ha ha (evil laugh)).
Seriously though, hope you are all having a great time, remember to slip, slop, slap and all that...
Bye for now
Jul, and Lance