By I’m in hardcore Christmas recovery mode at the moment. Christmas in NEPA means a three day onslaught of deserts, kielbasa, and booze with little to no room to rest in between, which while fun, seems to be harder and harder to bounce back from every year.
Aside from the post holiday grossness I’m currently feeling (and I’m hoping a much needed run will help out) Christmas this year was a great success.
I’m a big fan of “Eve’s” in general: Turkey Eve, Easter Eve, and Parade Day Eve. There’s something about the anticipation of what’s to come that gives these days added fun. Christmas Eve is one of my favorite days of the year. A small group of my friends traditionally go to our favorite bar, Franks, and from 12-4 before we all have to disperse for various dinners and masses. I don’t know if its NEPA or just Franks in general, but it’s always packed, everyone is in a good mood, and this year they had free appetizers set out. This is also a good way to spend some of your holiday with friends before breaking to family traditions.
We spend Christmas having dinner at my house before going to a neighborhood party down the street that lasted till somewhere around 2:00AM, and what do you know, but we got to trudge through a light dusting of snow on our walk home; the white Christmas evading the actual day by 2 hours.
Now, onto Christmas’s materialistic side: Santa was good to me this year. Better, some may say, than a 25 year old should hope for. My big gift was an I-Phone. It hasn’t arrived yet, but I’m happy to finally leave flip-phone territory behind. It should help out on here for picture taking purposes and posts on the go. I’m one of the few people I know without internet on their phone.
I also received some fun travel related gifts I’ll get to use in the upcoming few months. I purchased my family a cross country ski trip to Lake Placid, NY that I can finally discuss openly now that they’re aware of it. My whole family cross country skies and I’ve been eyeing up a trip to Lake Placid for some time now. Lake Placid hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics and many of the Olympic sites are still up and functional, including the Bobsled run which I’m most excited about. I’ll be posting pretty frequently about this trip in the near future. We’ll be up there during Martin Luther King Day weekend.
My sister got me a beer and cheese tasting class in Philly. I’ve been trying to be more adventurous when it comes to my beer consumption, so this will help.
My cousin got my brother, sister, and I a gift card for a company called Northeast Wilderness Experience located in Honesdale. I just got done perusing their website and am impressed with what they offer, which includes camping, rappelling, kayak rentals, and snow shoeing. We’ll end up either kayaking or snow shoeing since we camp enough we don’t need guides, and rappelling if off limits since I try to cry in public as little as possible (heights aren’t my thing). You can rent snow shoes for your own adventures, but what caught my attention is the snow shoe pub crawls they have scheduled. We just need snow.
My brother trumped everyone. He got me a ticket to see Dropkick Murphy’s on St. Patrick’s Day up in Massachusetts. St. Pat’s is a Saturday this year and we’d discuss going to Boston, but I wasn’t sure it would come to fruitation. I’m simultaneously doing a little research for this trip and realized the concert is held in Lowell, Mass, not Boston as I initially thought so we’ll have to figure out whether we stay there and take the train to Lowell (the concert’s at 2:00 so we can be back in Boston for the nighttime celebrations) or just stay in on site. The only things I know about Lowell are that it was an important city during the industrial revolution, the events in The Fighter took place there, and that it was the first town in the United States to use phone numbers (no clue how I know this, but a quick google search just confirmed it to be true).
Merry Christmas. I’m off to try and drop some holidy LB’s and cash some holiday checks
PA Weekend Fun 