It's the most wonderful time of the year...

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. I sure did! And although I made a peep last month about not being a "gift" person, when it comes down to it, I really enjoy the giving and the receiving at Christmastime. :-D

• My favorite gift to give - In our family the siblings do a mystery name exchange. This year I had Michael... and I did not know what to get him. Then, about a week before Christmas, I remembered that, last year, I had wished I had drawn his name so I could get him a cape, or the stuff to make it (If you know him well you would understand why.) So this year, that's what I did! I made him a calf-length black/red hooded cape. It was pretty crazy since I hadn't made anything like it before, but I finished it, well past the 11th hour, I might add. And he loved it! What was really funny: doing it as last minute as I was, I couldn't always wait until he was gone to work on it. When I was working on the red satin side, both he and Stephanie thought I was making a skirt! And after I had put the black and red together, Stephanie made some remarks. "You know what that looks like? A cape... like Michael's dream cape." I just kept quiet and grinned to myself.


• My favorite gift to receive - was a very special gift for the whole family - a violin!!! Valerie and I have wanted to start violin for a long time (longer for her) and we were thrilled! Everyone has tried it, but she and I have been practicing every day. I love it, and I've been picking it up pretty quickly. The smaller shape and fingerboard, the simplicity of doing only one note at a time (so far), it's all good.


• Oh, and if you care, my mom gave me a card reader for High-Capacity SD cards. :-)
  

Merry Christmas!

Here are the pictures that we put on our Christmas cards. Have a blessed Christmas!

Holidays, 2008 style

I hope you all had a great Christmas! We did, except for a few incidents of the "24 hr" flu. (Who knew that Dad and Chris both have a tendency to black out when they vomit?) This year, my parents' gift to us kids was a trip to the Creation Museum in Kentucky! We went there last spring on the way to Florida and really enjoyed it. Going again at this time of year was great because we could see all the Christmas extras... the live Nativity (above picture), the lights in the gardens, and my favorite - the special "Christmas Star" planetarium show. Plus they have a petting zoo now... no dinosaurs, but there's a camel and a zonkey/zedonk (never found out which one it was) .
















For New Year's Eve we did our yearly tradition of everyone making a batch of cookies. (Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that's 10 batches of cookies.) This year I made Cookie Dough Truffles (basically balls of chocolate chip cookie dough dipped in chocolate.. really good if not strictly "cookies"). New Year's Day we did our tradition of donut snowmen... it's quite a junk-food holiday for us, LOL.Hope you all had happy healthy holidays! Thank you Jesus for being the reason for the season!