On the Third Day of Christmas…

…I looked at my box of Christmas cards and thought, hmm, maybe tomorrow? And planned a trip to the dentist instead.

Wonderboy made it through the holiday with no infection, woohoo! His gum where the teeth got shoved up (and are still up there) is horribly red and swollen, still bleeding on and off. I watched him like a hawk for fever all week, but he’s been fine. Whew. The gum still needs attending, of course, so after breakfast, off we go. I bet they’re going to have to pull those teeth. (Not today.) Argh.

But our Christmas was lovely, lovely. On Christmas Eve we took a drive to the mountains, lunching in the same little mountain town Scott and I visited on my birthday. The girls marveled at the wildfire damage we saw on the way up, lots and lots of it.

I put a bunch more pictures on Flickr, if you’re interested. I snapped them all as we drove past, so some of them are blurry.

Julian is famous for its apples. In the autumn, San Diegans flock to the pick-your-own orchards surrounding the quaint little gold rush town. (Well, not this year. First, an early frost decimated the crop; then the wildfires overtook picking season.) The old-timey main street boasts a pie kitchen every hundred yards, more or less. We wanted to bring home a pie for our Christmas Eve dinner (bit of a pie theme going right now), but our first choice of bakeries was closed, and our second choice had a line out the door and down the block.

Scott ducked into a nearby garden shop we’d visited the week before (and where I found the perfect Christmas gift for my mom), purportedly to ask for a pie-shop recommendation. In a town famous for its apple pies, choosing the right pie shop is serious business. I took the kids to the "candy mine" in the basement of the neighboring drugstore. Mining for candy (filling a tin pail with bulk candy from the vast array in a sunken cavern) is also Serious Business, so this kept us occupied for some time, and I didn’t notice that it took Scott an awfully long time to get that pie-shop recommendation. On Christmas morning he surprised me with a dear little robins-egg-blue pitcher I’d been sighing over during the first trip, while shopping for my mother.

Sweet.