christmas and such

Remember how all I really wanted for Christmas was you...wait...I mean peace? I totally got it. I had a really nice holiday season. I felt completely okay taking a break from the craziness of leaving to just be with my family. There was no drama or stress, things just went along as they always do. It was great. Here are some pictures from my holiday season. Notice the lack of group pictures of us doing the normal Christmas things...I forgot to take pictures during the actual celebrating. Oops.

Luke got to put the angel on the tree. We got a new tree this year and it's pretty big so that will be Luke's job from now on because he's decidedly taller than the rest of us...which is still weird.

I was excited to make Christmas cookies which meant going through all of my mom and grandma's recipes to find the right Christmas ones. It was fun to see my grandma's handwriting again. It's been a long time. I found this recipe for "Angie's Dad's Favorite Brownies" which was cute. My grandma really loved my dad (and he loved her too!) which was always really nice.
I made this scarf for the Secret Santa thing at work. We had a $5 limit which is just not enough to have fun with but yarn is cheap so I made a scarf. It was for Tiffany, hence the "T". She liked it. What did I get from my Secret Santa you ask? NOTHING!! My Secret Santa sucked! I have filed a formal complaint with Starbucks, don't worry.
On Christmas Eve we go to Grandma B's (my step-dad's mom) for a Norwegian food. She makes lutefisk, which couldn't be more disgusting, but there are meatballs and lefse, which are amazing. On the wall by the door is Luke's growth chart. Other people started adding themselves, which is really rude. All of the blank ones are Luke, there are lots.

Grandma hard at work in the kitchen while we do nothing.

My aunt kept commenting on how Luke blended right into the painting he was sitting in front of. She was right.

I taught my niece how to lay under the tree to look at the lights. She thought it was a pretty fun trick. I love how she scrunches up her whole face when she smiles.

It was hard getting a picture of Carter without the Spiderman costume I let him wear all night...by all night I mean including to the movie theater and to the Burger King playland where he introduced himself to the other children as Spiderman. "Hi, my name is Spiderman"

The best part of my Christmas vacation was getting to spend tons of time with Crissa. I love that she has a job that lets her have Christmas break. She really wanted to meet Isaiah so we went over to Alisha's to see him. I had just found one of the old versions of Labyrinth at Barnes and Noble so we played it. We played this game THOUSANDS of times in junior high and high school. It was really really fun to play with the true Labyrinth masters again (No offense, Eli). Alisha won but only because she tricked us...typical. Cady (Crissa's sister) was there too but apparently not allowed to be in this picture.
We got this hat for Isaiah. We also got him a shirt that says "brrr" on it. He was really fun and completely cooperative when we needed to pretend we were 14 years old and just play Labyrinth and pretend we weren't growing up at all.

So that was basically my Christmas break. I'm glad that my memories of this time include so many good things and not things like airline luggage regulations, running out of sprinkles for the peppermint mochas or the fact that global warming killed all of the snow. I hope your Christmas included peace and joy too...oh and the Sufjan Stevens cd's...I definitely hope it included those!