Looking Festive

Christmas has come and gone with its usual swiftness! Here are our cousins and the four of us in our holiday finest. I think we were all envious of Amber and Autumn's boas, ha ha, but it actually wasn't that cold. We had one of our warmest Christmases ever: it made it into the mid 50's!

And here is our lovely tree as it appeared on that mild, green Christmas morning. So many presents! 

Here is this year's prettiest present award winner:

This present also deserves to be memorialized. It had arms!

This incredibly soft cheetah was inside. He/she (name still undetermined) was a total surprise. =) 

For the curious, here is Mom's generous haul of gifts!

Lily reports that the new pj's are as comfy as they look.

We were very excited for the other new stuffies as well. Here is Wendy meeting her mini me. We are thinking we'll call her Wanda.

Mom's been thinking about buying herself a second elephant Floppalot for quite some time. Never as a replacement for her beloved Norbert, but as a fun, look-alike friend for the little guy. A few months ago, she saved this one to the eBay watch list, and apparently Grandma took notice. 

The new elephant, Nora, is a lot less floppy than Norbert, has a different hairdo, and is and more saturated in color, as you can see. <3 

Mom has also given Nora a bow (one she wore in her own hair as a kid) to further differentiate.

On to our Star Stable news! Old, clunky Brinicle edged out frosty-whiskered Katur to become our seventh herd member on Dec. 23. (Funny how it was abruptly summertime during the girl-meets-horse sequence. Star Stable should really fix that...)

Brinicle has been around since late 2018, which makes him about the same vintage as Frosty. As such, he won't be able to wear many of the new tack items. Like Magic, he'll also never be wearing boots or polos due to his feathering. But, we have plenty of tack he can wear, so he'll be just fine.

He's unicorn-esque, color changing, and wintery all in one! We think he's pretty great! We named him Arcticair, or Artie for short. If you think it sounds like a fridge or air conditioner brand, you'd be right, but that's also... amusingly appropriate.

He has been zooming through the experience levels thanks to the Winter Village activities. Here he is on the way to his first snowstorm vortex.

It's a refreshing change of pace for there to be bears and wolves that want to cuddle rather than attack. <3

Here is Artie showing off his non-magical coat on Christmas Day.

We did more animal meeting and cuddling...

...and ended the big day by sending up red and green lanterns. 

Best holiday wishes, everybody! Until next year! 

Winter Magic

Star Stable has been transformed into a winter wonderland! It looks about how we remember when we first started playing back in February. 

Unlike in February, however, our stable is all decked out for the winter holiday season.

my favorite part is the frozen wash bay =)

Swirling winter vortexes announce the presence of special winter activities, such as...

...sending up lanterns

...playing hide and seek with the mini magical straw yule goats (always seeking, naturally). We've enjoyed this about as much as we did the seek-the-little-gourds task during the Halloween event. At least the goats aren't white. 

...and braving snowstorms to find missing people, animals, and items. In this case, it involved shoveling snow that drifted back with ridiculous swiftness.

Also new to us is the Winter Village, which Clara travels to via magical sleigh. 

I assume the horse magically flies behind or beside the sleigh, because he or she is always there when Clara arrives as well. They are deposited on a snow-covered rock formation, and the most direct way down is an icy slide! At the bottom is a cozy town by a frozen lake and surrounded by mountains.

The main objective of the festival seems to be to restore a giant broken crystal by gathering magical snowflakes. Unfortunately, this requires 18,000 magical snowflakes, and we've only just barely cracked 4000 after 2 weeks, so it's not looking good for the crystal. We're not overly concerned about it, since the progressive gifts for snowflake collection have been pretty lame.

Some of the other less monotonous activities include:

carving ice sculptures with a chainsaw

approaching wild magical horses

decorating Snowy the talking snowman

catching gingerbread gnomes and returning them to "base"

participating in races, portions of which involve running on magically-appearing ice paths in the sky, while watching out for careening flying sleighs.

and riding any of the below animals to rescue arctic fox kits from mischievous elves

My favorite is the moose. =)

The winter festival has been pretty fun, and we're gradually getting better at navigating, but it would be a lot more fun without the many bugs. The more benign ones, like randomly holding hay or the chainsaw at inappropriate times, aren't so bad. Other ones, like being unable to dismount, being unable to stop spinning in a circle, completing a task but never getting the reward for it, or the light beacon not disappearing after you've already completed that task, are very frustrating.

To Lily's relief, we did not end up purchasing any of the Black Friday super sale magical horses. The magical horses now on a less dramatic sale are all winter-themed. We've all agreed that this time, we will be taking one of them home! The current plan is to wait until next weekend, when winter and our Christmas break arrive.

The swirly Arabians remind us of fancy Christmas ornaments. We like them, but we already have an Arabian, plus it would be sad to get one without the other. The mountain goat one on the far right has a super cute snow leopard-esque coat, but we prefer unicorns to horses with double horns.

That leaves our top 4.

If we were ever to get an Andalusian, this would be the one. The fawn pattern in combination with the long, flowing locks is quite lovely. The Andalusian's slower gaits are not so lovely, unfortunately, though the one we'd use most (gallop) doesn't bother us.

We're not entirely sure how we feel about this guy's horn-like forelock, but his clunkiness and cheery demeanor make us smile. The price is right too.

 

Even though we already have a Paso Fino, this dazzling white unicorn is tempting! It's probably not going to happen, though, because we still have our hearts set on a light gray Lippizaner.

We've been seeing this guy all over the Winter Village. He seems to be the most popular of all the discounted winter magical horses, at least on our server. And for good reason: so fluffy and cute, with or without snow. The only negative we've come up with is that his frozen whiskers are distractingly extreme.

Which one will we choose? We'll let you know next time!