Christmas Eve Presents

Sheila and I have always exchanged Christmas presents on Christmas Eve so we did the same this year.  Below are a select few photos from last night.  We had a nice night!

I received a tabletop micrometer for cutting very fine slices of specimens for viewing and imaging under the microscope...

Sheila came home from her office Christmas party this year and was a bit bummed that someone chose to take her Yankee Swap gift.  She had a miniature sled that would have worked perfectly with our Christmas decorations in our garden window but someone chose to "steal" her gift.  

Upon hearing this replay of events, I immediately and quietly got online to see if I could find the right size sled...  I found a package of three sleds that were the exact size she said she had at the Yankee Swap...  so, she was excited and surprised to see she had her sleds again!

It was a hard find but I managed to get the book "Wicked" for Sheila at a rare reasonable price...  another gift that surprised her and got her excited...

While we were sleeping last night, something weird and very surprising happened.  Something weird happening really isn't all that unusual because weird things like this incident often happen to me but the sequence of events on this Christmas Eve night was interesting and has us a bit baffled...  

I got up at around 2:20am to make my way to the bathroom for the first of my nighttime bathroom visits.  Before I awoke, I was having a dream about my mom.  

I often talk with people in my dreams from my life who have passed but I very rarely see my mom in my dreams.  I talk with friends who have passed very often.  I talk occasionally with close relatives who have passed.  But, honestly, I very rarely see my mom in my dreams and when I do she has always just been someone else in the room.  She was, however, in my dreams last night and we did have a short conversation which I'm not sure has ever happened since her passing in 2009.  

In the dream, she was her young adult self...  thin, young, brunette...  probably in her early 20s around the time I was born.  After we had a short conversation, she was showing me her Christmas outfit and asked how she looked.  It was indeed a 1960s style outfit which matched the timeframe of how she appeared to me.  This was an outfit with a wool weave with some shiny, Christmassy trim on it.  After we talked for a bit, she asked how she looks...  I'm no fool so I always approach this particular question with great caution.

I hesitantly explained that what she was wearing wasn't really to my taste but she looked good.  Then I awoke and got up to use the bathroom.  

When I got back into bed, I wasn't lying there more than a minute when Sheila and I both heard what sounded like a greeting card falling.  We don't have any Christmas cards hanging in the house so I knew it wasn't a card but this sounded exactly like that.  We both muttered something like, "what was that?"  It didn't sound like anything related to the house (heating, electrical, fire, burglar, etc) so I just went back to sleep without checking on what the sound could have been.  

When I awoke this morning and walked over to my desk, an old photo of Lukey with Elf ears was sitting right in the middle of my desk.  I hadn't seen this photo in at least a year...  it was perfectly clean, no dust on it...  and I don't even have any idea where I had this photo stored.  The last time I saw this photo, it was actually matted in a frame!  Now it was on my desk like it had fallen there...  

I called out to Sheila to ask if she remembered hearing something during the night.  She said, "Oh yeah...  it sounded like a greeting card falling."

I then pointed to my desk and her eyes went wide.  She asked, "where was that?"  

I told her I had no idea but there is no way it could have "fallen" onto my desk.  It didn't even have any dust on it like it was loosely sitting on the shelves over my desk.  I thought this photo was in a frame stashed away somewhere (because Lukey doesn't really care for this photo).  Yet, this photo somehow "fell" onto my desk during the night last night...  

So, did we have a visitor last night?  Perhaps since my mom seemed to visit me last night in my dream, maybe my mom liked the photo of Lukey with the pointy ears...  or maybe it was Sheila's mom who recently passed away?  Or, maybe it was Santa telling us he likes Elf Lukey?

Someone in some form placed this photo on my desk.

So, after we discussed my dream a little bit and the possibilities of how the photo of Elf Lukey could possibly end up on my desk (there still is no reasonable explanation based on reality as we know it), I made Christmas breakfast.  We had bacon, coffee, and French Toast made with thick sliced Challah bread.  It was delicious!

Christmas would be boring without a few surprises!

Now I need to get to work on a few surprises for the grandkids when they are here for Christmas this weekend.