Christmas 2012

From our date night, on the 23rd

 
It's really hard for me to believe that Christmas has already come and gone. It was our first Christmas married, and I have to say that it was a great one, full of new and old traditions that I cannot wait to share with our children when we have them in the future. As of now, though, we are enjoying the holidays as our tiny family of two, before going over and spending time with our families. We used to have a tradition of celebrating "our" Christmas on the 23rd (since we do everything on the 23rd), but we decided to change things up a bit this year.

Aren't the lights amazing?

Since we knew we would wake up at home Christmas morning, we decided to keep up our date night on the 23rd, but wait to do our presents. Instead, that night we invited my brother and his fiance out for a double date night. We went to dinner and then went to a place called Prairie Lights, where they had about 4 million Christmas lights set up. It was incredibly, to say the least. It was definitely a night full of many laughs and great memories, and a tradition I hope to continue for awhile, maybe doing something different each year.

Our winning gingerbread house, we didn't plan the Christmas colored shirts!

For the past few years, we have had the tradition of doing Christmas with my parents on Christmas Eve. Since we were all getting married/in relationships, it seemed like the best time to do it because none of us ever had big plans that day. This year, was by far the best so far. We had fun games like a gingerbread house competition (which we won (look at that beauty!)) and a Christmas Song scramble (which we won). We dominated the games, coming away with $22 in scratch off lottery tickets! We spent some time coloring, went to church as a family, had a dinner of my mom's famous, incredible lasagna, and opened presents. It was a great day, and it went by incredibly fast. This year felt very much like Christmas!

We went to see the Nutcracker ballet the weekend after Thanksgiving.

 Christmas morning, we did "our" Christmas together. I put some cinnamon rules in the oven, and we did stockings and opened our presents to one another while we waited on breakfast to cook. It was a lot of fun just having the time together. I know that this time will be set aside for us from now on, which will make for wonderful Christmas mornings when we have children. Christmas day was spent with Michael's family, something we have been doing for several years as well. His grandpa lives with his mom now, and his aunt and uncle were in from Minnesota, so most of his mom's side of the family was there, which made for a fun day. We had a big Christmas lunch, watching some Christmas movies, did a gift exchange, had dinner together, and then opened some more gifts. It was a great day, and a great holiday season!

Now comes New Years, taking down the Christmas decorations, and starting in on semester number two of my first year teaching. Hoping everyone else had a Merry Christmas!