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!

More Magic

We hope everybody has had a fantastic Thanksgiving weekend! We thoroughly enjoyed the sunny, dry stretch we are just now exiting. It's back to gloom today, and our first snow dump since Halloween is underway.

Unlike Michigan's weather, Star Stable isn't jumping on the winter holiday bandwagon quite yet. Instead, they revamped the Hollow Woods area (a perpetual summer forest) with updated graphics and new activities. It's been a hefty, involved update process, or at least Milton (Mom's 7-year old Macbook) thinks so. The last few updates have seriously taxed him, taking a good 25 minutes each at minimum. *Sighs* The time may be coming soon when we can't play Star Stable on Milton anymore. We are dreading that day.

We didn't ride over for the full Hollow Woods experience until Saturday. We quickly met a lovely wild horse named Rune Runner:

 Rune Runner guided us to some human NPC's and the heart of the action, a giant runestone:

We then proceeded to catch fireflies until we were weary of the monotony and jerky graphics.

Progressing through the many levels of "whimsy" and "runology" is going to take us many, many sittings. I guess that's the idea.

We were excited for the return of the horse bazaar this week, expecting deep discounts in correlation with Black Friday. Star Stable did indeed deeply discount select horses: 50% off! I thought we'd for sure be able to talk ourselves into taking home horse #7.

All of the discounted horses are magical, some more horse-like than others. The idea is that you can then go explore the magical revamped Hollow Woods with a new magical horse.

What's extra cool about these guys is that you sort-of get two horses in one: each has both a magical appearance - the ones you see above - and also a "trying to blend in with the non-magics" disguise that they can toggle between.

Here's my personal favorite, Proteus. He can either be a funky lionfish-horse hybrid:

or an extremely handsome zorse:

The strikes against him:

- he is based off the narcoleptic Appaloosa

- we already have a striped equine

- if we were going to get an Appaloosa, it seems wrong for it not to have spots

- he has no special abilities whatsoever when it comes to riding into/through water, which makes no sense

Here is Bethany's favorite, Faramawr, the green dragon:

who likes to masquerade as a horse with the Friesian build:

The strikes against him:

- when idling, Friesians do a piaffe-like move where the back legs bend in an unnatural position that makes us cringe

- if we were going to get a Jorvegian Friesian, we feel like it should have the long, flowing Friesian mane, not tiny button braids

- he might scare the horses 

- it would be hard to come up with a name from Star Stable's very limited options that suits both a green dragon and a clay-colored horse. We tried.

Here is Lily's favorite, Kampos the opalescent seahorse creature:

who disguises himself as a pinto Akhal Teke:

The strikes against him:

- he has mildly creepy pale eyes as a seahorse

- he is sadly lacking a mane in horse form, and his markings seem rather unrealistic/like a bleach accident

- the gaits of the Star Stable Akhal Tekes are underwhelming

- like the other fish-themed horses, he has no special abilities whatsoever when it comes to riding into/through water, which makes no sense

And here is Julie's favorite, the beautiful blue crystal-studded Ephyra:

who can turn off the blue to appear as a grulla:

There's only one strike against her (since we love the Paso Fino, duns, and sparkles), but it's a big one:

- we just bought Riverrock the Paso Fino in October. For variety's sake, we've so far been avoiding duplicates of the same breed

One more snag: we've heard that these magical animals all appear as their undisguised selves when you enter your stable, regardless of which version you left toggled on previously. Do we really want to see a dragon or hippocamp in a stall every single stable visit? Bethany wouldn't mind in the slightest, but the rest of us aren't so sure...

It is therefore with a heavy heart that I tell you we will likely not be taking advantage of the super tempting discount. We are big fans of magical horses - just ask Tigertin - but nobody in this particular lineup has managed to wow all 4 of us. =( 

To end on something happier and a bit more festive, enjoy these photos from Mom's recent visit to Michigan's "little Bavaria," Frankenmuth. 

The hotel room itself was not especially Bavarian lodge-esque...

...but the bed was quite cozy...

...and the view out their window was fun. Mom enjoyed hearing peoples' whoops of excitement as they rode these two waterslides, ha ha. 

Each room in the hotel is named after a family with historic ties to the area. The one Mom stayed in was named after the Dress family, pictured below. 

This central panel, where the family included a portrait of an unnamed deceased child in their group photo, was rather haunting. Luckily, Mom is so nearsighted sans glasses that there was no chance of her being spooked by the old photos overnight.

Mom and fam took a chill cruise down the Cass River on The Bavarian Belle, which used to paddle the Mississippi River back in the day. They bundled up, sat on the top deck, and had a great time despite some intermittent rain.

For supper, they lived it up at Zehnder's, a restaurant famous for its chicken dinners. Mom enjoyed the chicken but was more impressed by the butter noodles and cranberry salad (eaten separately, of course)... and the little plastic animals that came perched on the desserts. 

Grandma got an elephant, our great aunt got a monkey, and Mom got a... what is that? Mom's a Taurus, so we'll go with bull.

The star attraction of the whirlwind trip: a stop at Bronner's Christmas Wonderland, a massive Christmas store.

They weren't in the market for a tree, but they still visited the little forest of Christmas trees anyway. That orange one certainly stands out from the crowd. =)

Even though this expedition took place in mid October, not December, Mom and fam had lots of company as they wandered around browsing and admiring all the festive decorations.

They lovingly picked out some new ornaments for various family members. We all know who the horse was for...

Keep up the good work, Bronner's. You never disappoint!