Thursday, December 15, 2011

Christmas Guests

In a 11 short days my in-laws will be joining us for the holidays. They fly up the day after Christmas and leave just after the new year. We've lived in Alaska for a little over a year now and this will be their first trip up here. I've told several of my friends that they are coming and everyone has had a similar response; "Really, in December?"

See December isn't the ideal time to visit Alaska. The days are short and the nights are long and dark. The midnight sun won't be out for months. The temperatures can be sub zero for days on end making it somewhat undesirable to do much outside. I would much rather have first time visitors come in the summer and see how truly beautiful Alaska is but my in-laws didn't want to miss another Christmas with the grandkids, I can respect that, so north they come.

Assuming the weather is corporative I have a few really fun activities planned for their visit. I want to take them to the Winter Ice Park in North Pole. I also think it would be fun all of us to go to the fireworks display that the University has on New Year's Eve. I've never been, mostly due to not wanting to fight crowds, so if we are going to go now seems the time! I also want to take them to the muesum, which isn't dependant on the weather.

Overall I know we will have a great time. We've already had a deep freeze in November and recently the temperatures have been pretty mild. I'm hoping that the weather will wait to bottom out until the day they leave. That way they can say they've experienced -20 but we can still enjoy some of the winter activities.

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