Christmas in Battle Ground

We hope everyone had a splendid Christmas! We drove up to Battle Ground a few days before Christmas to spend time with Jennilyn’s family. Her brother Rex was in town from New York for a week, so it was great having the Hill family all reunited. And of course, it was be Kadence’s first Christmas, so we were excited to include her into our Christmas traditions.

Christmas is generally a pretty stressful time of year for me. My busiest time at work is around the Christmas season, when the marketing department finishes the annual catalog and I update the web site with new products, services, and information. However, this year, Jennilyn and I managed to finish our Christmas shopping early, so the stress of finding gifts last minute was alleviated.

I was quite excited about the present we got for Jennilyn’s family. A few weeks prior, we visited her folks while two of her brothers were there visiting. Her brothers had recently played laser tag and Jennilyn’s mom mentioned that she loved laser tag. Since that day, I was on a mission to find out how to set up laser tag for Jennilyn’s mom for Christmas or her birthday (which is two days after Christmas).

There was a brand of laser tag guns that were highly regarded, but they were too expensive and also sold out. Just my luck. I found a place in Eugene that would rent the guns at a nominal fee, but I was interested in purchasing the guns since I was sure the family would play laser tag more than once.

I guess the idea of laser tag intrigued me because it was a physical and fun game. We would all get exercise and have fun doing so. Plus, being a guy—a guy who plays shoot ’em up video games—I’m naturally drawn to things that shoot. Even if the guns shoot invisible laser beams; it still shoots.

I eventually landed on a brand of laser tag guns that was the holy grail. I found laser tag pistols for $12.50 a pair. I read some reviews and while the general consensus was that Laser Challenge wasn’t a great product, it was affordable to get 8 guns.

On Christmas eve, we managed to get out to Jennilyn’s parents’ backyard and got in a few games of regular team elimination and capture the flag. The guns worked just fine and had pretty good range. As an aside, what I do like about this laser gun setup is that you have to aim for the weapon since the sensor is on the gun, which makes the game less about ‘shooting people’ and more about removing the threat.

The other treat of the Christmas weekend was that Rex managed to nab a Nintendo Wii in New York before he flew back. The whole family had a great time with the simple Wii games. We played a lot of golf, bowling, and boxing. It is a great social gaming system. I had read a lot about the Wii (and strongly considered getting one, so much that it was on our baby registry ;P) so it was great to finally play with one to see if it lived up to the hype.

The controllers were pretty phenomenal in how it detected motion. It wasn’t completely accurate simulation as we were playing golf in our chairs, swinging the Wii-motes with some sort of acceleration to get the right motion. However, the amount of immersion is fun if you went through the true-to-life motions.

Of all the Wii Sports games we played, I think I enjoyed bowling the best. The background tune was catchy and the game captured the essence very well. Golf was pretty good, but I sucked at it. Boxing wasn’t quite accurate in its punches, but I couldn’t help but throw punches in full swing. My shoulders were quite sore afterwards.

Kadence got plenty of family time, with each member of the family taking turns getting to know her. Jenni’s parents were kind enough to watch her as Jenni and I took a trip to a nearby Fred Meyers then visiting Lucia falls. I neglected to bring my camera, but we got a neat shot of the waters with Jenni’s camera, set to underexpose two stops, which gave the waters a dark atmosphere, like it was within a cave. I was hoping that the underexposure would allow me to slow the shutter speed down on Jenni’s point-and-shoot camera, but no luck. However, the picture still came out interesting.

Lots of family time throughout our four days of Christmas, which is a huge blessing. As everyone is leading their own lives and building their own families, I’m thankful each year when everyone can get together and celebrate Christmas together.

See pictures from our Christmas »