Gift from a Secret Santa

This holiday season, in honour of both Grandma and Cora coming to visit over Christmas and the Dickson family coming to celebrate New Years, Ian and I decided it was appropriate to go all out decorating the outside of the main house.  This involved putting up heaps more Christmas lights and the even more time consuming task of creating a homemade evergreen garland for our front porch.  As you can imagine, we had a substantial amount of greenery left over after trimming our Christmas tree to size and so we decided to use it to decorate the porch railing.  It looks pretty good for a DIY project!

As we moved along the front gardens zip-tying the branches to the railing we stumbled across a surprise gift thoughtfully left for us by a Secret Santa.

As you can see - the gift was a dead rodent.  While I do appreciate the occasional fuzzy rodent (I have grown quite attached to Gus), I am not a huge fan of finding them frozen solid outside my front door.

Seeing that winter is the detective's best helper, it wasn't difficult to ascertain who our friendly gift giving neighbour was.  Judging by the feline tracks leading directly from the mouse, down our driveway, up George and Isabelle's driveway and into their garage; I'd say the odds are pretty good that the mouse giving Santa Claus is George's cat.

Not exactly what I was looking to receive for Christmas this year, but it's a start...  let's just hope that the real Santa Claus leaves gifts under the tree that are closer to the mark.