A few years ago, I gave my Mom a great present that cost practically nothing.

I used to work close to my grandmother’s (Granny) house and I would eat lunch with her several times a week. She would often have little chores for me to do when I arrived—change a light bulb, get something off a shelf or out of a closet.

One closet retrieval trip I found a huge box of old photos. Some of them were over 50-years old and others I remember from my childhood. We don’t have many photos from when I was young. My Mom’s housed burned and our photos were lost. That was about 15-years ago.

So, I asked her if I could borrow this box and scan a bunch of them in. Granny told me to just take them, she didn’t want them anymore. Reluctantly I took them, knowing they would be safe with me.

It was probably a year later, just in passing, my Mom mentioned how she missed having the photo of her Dad (we called him Paw Paw) in his Army uniform. It, like all the other photos, was lost in the fire.

I remembered seeing that photo in the box Granny gave me. So, I did a little digging and found it. It was a little beat up. So after a quick scan and a trip through Photoshop, I had a great looking photo to print and give to her.

It was the simplest gift, but meant so much to her. Those are the gifts I life to give.

Quite possibly my favorite picture of the 350+ photos taken over the December/Christmas 2007 holiday. I’ll get more uploaded soon, but this one was too good not to share immediately.

Christmas has come and gone and I hope everyone had a merry one, but it’s still not too late for a little Christmas nugget of fun.

Every year AstroBase Go (Jackson Publick & Doc Hammer) produce a Venture Brothers related Christmas MP3. They’re always great and this year’s song is no exception. Visit QuickStopEntertainment.com to hear the Monarch and Dr. Girlfriend sing “Fairytale of New York” and check out the archived links of previous years tunes. The 2006 “Venture Aid” is still the best.

Carter was ready for Santa this year. He went to visit him during the day on Monday and showed Santa his Wal-Mart Wish Book with the stickers on all the items he liked.

Say what you will about Wal-Mart. The wish book was a cool idea (and a good marketing one, as well). It gave Carter a visual reminder of all the things he liked and it made me remember being a kid and looking through the Sears and JC Penny catalogs at the pages and pages of toys. I would carefully make a list, listing the item and page number of each thing I wanted. Just like Ralphie, I had to have a specific item each year. Good memories and hopefully Carter will have them too.

In the video, he’s not driving that well, but he’s been practicing. Just the other day he backed it out of the garage, turned it around and drove off, all without hitting a single thing.