The Museum Wall

When you hail from a big family (think three siblings and three sibling's spouses) Christmas shopping can be challenging. We've solved that problem in our family with a Christmas drawing. Every year, the grandkids... my boys along with my nieces and nephews... place all of the adult names in a hat and draw them out to determine which adult buys a gift for which other adult.  Pretty simple... probably a variant on many a family's tradition. To further simplify the process, no Christmas lists are allowed. No one can request, hint, or otherwise state what they desire as a gift. Instead, a theme is chosen, and one's gift must fit within the theme. In the past, themes have been water, sports, and outdoors among others.

Fitting a gift into the theme and making sure that the receiver of the gift actually likes the gift can be a challenge in itself. But, that may be part of the fun. Sometimes one has to get pretty creative. For example, I was chosen to buy a gift for my sister-in-law the year that the theme was outdoors.  I could have bought her an umbrella or a jacket or gardening tools. Instead, knowing that she already had and umbrella, gardening tools and numerous jackets, I bought her a gift certificate to a local day spa. The catch was that, when it came time for her to open her present on Christmas Day, I made her open her present outside.  Get it? outdoors... outside! I am so clever!

This Christmas past, the theme was antique. My younger brother received a wood and brass fly reel from the distant past. My dad received two tickets to a Tony Bennet concert, and my sister-in-law received very old black and white pictures of distant ancestors, carefully mounted in antique frames. I received one (1) antique snowshoe. Caren received a matching one.

Immediately I began picturing The Museum Wall...

We mounted the snowshoes above our barnwood coat rack and began cruising Craigslist and Ebay for the skis and poles. I wanted to put an antique ice-axe on the wall as well, but we seem to have run out of room. I haven't given up entirely on the ice-axe, but it will probably end up on a different wall.

It seems a little cliche, having antique skis and snowshoes mounted on the wall in a Tahoe cabin, but each piece speaks a little bit to the history of the sports we love to do, so we are more than happy to display them in our little house.

Believe it or not, mounting the skis and poles on The Museum Wall was all the work that I completed last weekend... Instead, I skied and hiked in the snow.