Christmas Reprise

For all that buildup Christmas goes by so fast.

Christmas Eve was nice, we spent it with my Dad's family at Grandma's new house. Ok so letting my Aunt Denise's dog lick the plates after dinner wasn't a good idea because the dog farted all night and cleared four of us off the couch at one point, but it's a good lesson learned. It was nice being somewhere where we actually had room to spread out and enjoy the night, instead of being crammed into the tiny apartment that she used to live in above her restaurant. It was a relaxing night and then we went to Mass and that was nice, as it always is.

Christmas Day was just long. It took me a while to fall asleep at night and then when I finally did fall asleep I got woken up by a thud, which I learned in the morning was the chair that Mom was standing on breaking underneath her and her landing on her tailbone. Ouch. Since we were having Christmas dinner at our house because Grandma was still sick, I got up at the lovely hour of 6:30am (I'd forgotten that that time existed since I've been home on break) and helped Dad make the stuffing and stuff the turkey. 22 pounds of turkey to feed 14 people. Got some nice gifts from mom and dad, a new suede coat, some totally awesome pants, kickass skirt and a sweater that I really liked, plus some Princess seat covers for my car (Yay! I don't have to sit on metal in my car anymore!). And it was a white Christmas too! We got about 6 inches of snow, and the plow did it's lovely trick of leaving all the snow from the road by the end of our driveway (I just love living on the circle of our road) so my brother and I got assigned the task of shovelling the driveway and all the snow that the plow left for us. I'm not used to that kind of back breaking labor :P

Everyone came over for dinner at about 2:30 and it took all of 2.5 seconds for the living room to turn into the land of wrapping paper. Of course, having my two cousins under the age of 3 doesn't really help with that. It was really fun though, especially the look on Michael's face when he found out that his Elmo did the hokey pokey. I got more clothes from Grandma and Uncle Tom and a new pair of leather boots. But I think that the gift that I'm going to have the most fun with is the chocolate fondue pot that I got from my cousin Sara and her boyfriend Jason. Chocolate covered strawberries anyone?

Dinner was kind of amazing, we had our big dining room table all folded out and a card table at the end of it with Michael and Matthew's high chairs at the end of the dining room table. 14 of us around that table, and baby Camden getting passed between Sara and Jason because he wanted to be part of dinner. I'm surprised that the table didn't bow under the amount of food that we had on it. Wow.

After dinner we watched Finding Nemo and Matthew (who has just realized that he can walk and run) spent most of the rest of the evening running between the kitchen and living room and taking headers all over the place. It really was a fun day. And Grandma loved the teapot that I made her.

After everyone finally left, we headed over to some friend's of the family's and stayed there for a few hours just talking and visiting. Fun stuff.

And of course I took plenty of Christmas pictures

And now today is the day of resting and hitting all of the post Christmas sales.