Christmas 2010.

I now feel the full force of familial blog-guilt, since Julie and Jenny seem to have both posted about Christmas within the last 30 minutes. Even Muffin Monster is posting at a far more rapid rate than I ever have done.

So here are just a handful of Christmas shots from Team Vallentine, to ward off the nagging and niggling...

It was, in fact, a white Christmas:

One of our two Christmas trees, finally with popcorn strings:

Here I am demonstrating how the socks I had just received perfectly matched one of the layers I was wearing:

Mark:

Monsternapped!

I was hoping my next blog post was going to be catching up with photographs but something terrible has happened. Muffin Monster, everyone's favorite LBM, has been monsternapped!

We last saw him this morning, not long after his latest blog post. He went out to try out his new woolly santa hat in the snow and to get a newspaper. He never came back. A couple of hours later, we received this picture:

At first we thought he might have stopped by a friend's winter fire to warm up, but soon after we received this threatening message:

"Your little monster's getting hot."

No other messages or ransom demands, but we await instructions from the monsternappers. In the meantime hope that somehow, MM is able to send us a message.