Christmas Evening

We were invited to a marvelous house for Christmas dinner.  The husband of the home is an emergency room doctor and had to work on Christmas day and so his wife held Christmas for him until he could get home that evening.  The family goes by the last name of Allred and had a magnificent home.

Bro. Allred enjoys hunting and then having his prey stuffed and mounted.  His house is very large and the two main rooms show off the animals he has brought back from his hunts all over the world.



If you look closely at the photos, you'll notice that Sis. Allred has decorated her house for the holidays and has put little red and white hats on some of the animals in the home.  She also has a couple very large fireplaces and trees that are also decorated.



These photos don't show all of the stuffed animals, only some of them.  As soon as I pulled my camera out, I realized that my battery was about to die and so I quickly ran around taking as many photos as I could before it the battery died.  I am sad to say I didn't get a photo of the 14 foot crocodile that was lounging near one of the fireplaces.

The Allreds had decorated their home with all these animals and had also a medieval theme.  They had daggers and swords framed and mounted on the walls.  They had suits of armor standing in corners and alcoves.  There was a joker riding this leopard/cheetah...

I loved this wall-hanging of a castle and had to take a picture of it.  I really loved all the medieval decorations mixed in with the mounted animals.

Have any of you been to the Monte L. Bean Life Science Museum on the campus of BYU?  My dad used to take my brothers and I to the museum for FHE (Family Home Evening) on Monday nights.  We went often enough that I knew which floor different animals were on and could find my favorite displays.  (As a side note, I really like the beetle display at one time in my growing up years).  Anyway, long story shorter, when I entered this room the first thing I thought of was the Bean Museum and when a few other families arrived a little later, I also heard people exclaim that this house reminded them of the Bean Museum.  Isn't the above picture awesome?  Apparently Bro. Allred brought back the zebra and lion together on this hunting excursion and had them mounted like this...awesome!

And here is SM with his favorite animal of the two rooms...the giraffe!  His first favorite animal was the 14 foot crocodile until he turned around a couple seconds later and saw the giraffe mounted on the wall.  We had to get a photo with the giraffe.  I like that you can also see a suit of armour behind him and a framed dagger on the wall.

I didn't post all the pictures I took of the Allred home but I did have to show all these heads with awesome horns.   In the upper left corner you can see a goose with a small red hat.  There were quite few birds and fish that I didn't get pictures of but they were there!

This was a mural painted on one wall that came down and out into the living space.  The diorama included a large animal (the deer) and a few smaller animals.  We have a black crow getting ready to peck at a tan human skull in the brush as a beaver works at gathering sticks for his home from the small stream that goes through the diorama.  If you look at the mural you will see a knight on his horse turned toward the castle on the hill.

There were a couple large decorative chairs and  I had to get a picture of at least one before my battery died.  And I did get one of their Christmas trees in the photo.

And we'll end the tour of the animals in the Allred home with this photo of a moose above a fireplace.  If the men would have moved and I would have pointed my camera down to the ground, I would have taken a photo of the crocodile but I guess I missed out.