Gnomes

I really like gnomes. When I was a kid, my mom owned this book:

To say that my sister and I were obsessed with this book, is an understatement. We read the entire thing cover to cover about a hundred times and then we set out to look for gnomes. Our favorite gnome hunting grounds was at my grandparents house in New Hampshire. They live up in the mountains near the Canadian border and every picture you take looks like something that belongs in The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit. We used to look for “gnome holes” in the trunks of trees for hours.We would scour the ground for “signs” of gnome activity and every now and then we would swear we saw a flash of a red hat.

Gnomes was not the only source of information for our obsession. We also watched the television program “David The Gnome” religiously. If you did not experience this program on Nickelodeon growing up, you missed out. Here’s the intro to the series:

The second clip is from the series finale. As my sister said, “I wept like a child.” Well, we were children.

After all of this, it seems fitting that for Christmas my sister gave me a giant, red ceramic gnome. We also received not one, but two of these:

We now have three Steeler’s gnomes in our yard.