Christmas Loot

Christmas is a season of family, community, thanksgiving, worship, peace and celebration.

And…it’s also a time for presents.

Given the amount of time I spend watching, writing and thinking about various geeky things, it’s no surprise that a lot of my gifts skew that direction as well.

This includes some geeky-themed clothing–a Batman T-Shirt, some Justice League briefs and some Peanuts socks.

This represents me fairly well, actually. I tend to get given a lot of Star Wars stuff, and though I do enjoy those movies (especially the original three), DC Comics is actually something I’m usually more excited about.

Case in point: I bought the latest volume of Mark Waid’s Flash (volume 8, specifically) with some vouchers that I was given to our local comic shop.

Waid is one of my favorite writers and Wally West as the Flash might be my favorite character, so these were a no-brainer for me.

My wife and I also bought each other a year’s subscription to Britbox, a streaming service full of British shows from the BBC and ITV. It has a variety of shows I’m interested in watching or rewatching or continuing, like Death in Paradise, Red Dwarf and Jonathan Creek.

It’s also got pretty much every episode of Doctor Who that’s available, which is exciting but strange. I’m used to Doctor Who as a show that I “collect”–slowly pulling together my favorite stories on DVD or iTunes. Now suddenly it’s all there. I’ve never really been used to binging the the classic series–it’s actually been a long time since I’ve watched any of it in order. I enjoy the idea of skipping around the original 26 seasons and viewing it a bit piecemeal. So we’ll have to see how this goes.

So far, though, I’ve watched the last episode of The Dalek Invasion of Earth because that’s where I’d gotten up to in rewatching the story recently. And since I was watching it after midnight on Christmas night, it was actually on December 26th, which means I was unintentionally watching the episode on its 57 year anniversary!

I have to admit it certainly was convenient to be able to view it without having to worry about setting up the DVD or anything. My family and I also watched the first two episodes of the latest season of All Creatures Great and Small, which is a show we like.

And a present that wasn’t for me but rather from me, but which I still get to enjoy, is the game Everdell.

The game simulates families of woodland creatures trying to develop your little forest village by building constructions or raising up critters to fill it. We played it once recently and my daughter loved it, so we got for her for Christmas, and just yesterday had a game. I lost pretty badly, but it was fun to play.

It took us a little while to figure out what we were doing, though, so hopefully next time we’ll be able to cruise through it a bit more easily.

There were some other random things that got thrown into the mix–like a nice diary for 2022.

I like the layout of the pages–a little different than usual. Also a daily desk calendar with brain teasers and puzzles on it.

I can hardly wait for January 1st!

I was also given some money which I’m figuring out how to spend. One thing I know I’m looking at it some new (for me) Big Finish Doctor Who audios–it’s always nice to have some new ones on hand to listen to in the car or wherever.

And funniest of all, my friend Matt gave my family a picture of himself. He is returning to his home in North America soon and we’ll all miss him a lot. For Christmas he gave a bunch of his friends pictures like this–all unique shots from the same photo shoot.