What a difference a year makes

I wanted to post this earlier, but had technical difficulties. Having surmounted those problems, I now present two dramatically different scenarios. First, Christmas in 2011 looked like this for my family:

This is my son's unit last Christmas posing around an old Soviet tank  in Now Zad, Afghanistan. Probably a T-62, but that's neither here nor there. In any event, that was then. This was what Christmas 2012 looked like:

No longer under fire, he got engaged. I refuse to draw any parallels between combat and marriage.