Since this was our first Christmas back in Cali we had to figure out how to incorporate our love of simple quiet holidays with visiting lots of relatives and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.
On December 18th we went to a party at my cousin’s house for my Dad’s side of the family.
It was a lot of fun. I spent the days before the party baking 3 different types of cookies and two kinds of rice crispy treats to give out. The cookies turned out great but the royal icing was still wet on the sugar cookies so they didn’t look quite as nice as I had planned.*
It was also really cool because our Mamaw (Grandma, Dad’s Mom) just moved back to town last month after being away for 10 years. Everyone had a lot of fun eating, visiting and wearing silly glasses.
Originally we were going to have Christmas Eve at Waldo’s brother’s house but all of his family came down with the plague the day before so we switched up plans and it worked out great. Except for the sick babies part. Waldo’s brother has 4 boys; 12, 10, 2 1/2 and 1 (I think) and I think all of them were sick. We ended up having a really nice dinner at home with Waldo’s parents and then Lily opened her gifts from them.
I spent the days leading up to Christmas baking cookies and rice crispy treats to give out.*
Waldo made us hot chocolate and his Dad (Papa) started a fire. It was so cozy.
Waldo’s Mom Rita whom Lily calls ReRe made Lily a beautiful quilt and pillow case.
ReRe and Papa got her an easel, paper and markers along with a pack of Little people to go with the house she got a few weeks ago.
Lily always asks that you draw a kitty for her and we do but none of us are very talented. After a lot of drawing and playing we went to bed with hopes of sleeping in the following morning. And what can only be called a Christmas Miracle Lily didn’t wake up until 8 on Christmas morning. YAY.
After getting ready to go Waldo, Lily and I headed over to my Memaw’s (my Mom’s mom) house for chocolate gravy. This is the thing that I have been looking forward to most of all. It is a family tradition to have Memaw’s chocolate gravy for Christmas breakfast and it didn’t disappoint. My Grandparents house was packed to the gills with family, it was very noisy and a lot of fun.
We opened gifts then took a couple of pictures.
Once we were done Waldo, Lily and I left to go visit my Dad. We didn’t get any pictures over there but Lily got a lot of nice clothes and a couple of cute dolls. Then it was home so Lily could nap and then open her gifts from us.
Waldo and I had decided long ago that we don’t really exchange gifts with each other and that we wouldn’t go crazy for our kid(s). We want the holidays to be about family and not stuff. We did pretty good this year. We got Lily 3 little gifts and one slightly bigger thing. Actually one of the smaller gifts was suppose to be for one of the nephews but he already had something very similar only way better so we gave it to Lil instead and I have already gotten rid of it.
Both of Lil’s little gifts (that we bought specifically for her) were see and says. The smaller of the two was her favorite thing ever until she opened her last and best gift.
Lily loves Yo Gabba Gabba and we weren’t 100% sure which character she loved the most but she says TooDee’s name pretty often and she looked the cuddliest so we went with her. It was a huge hit.
After opening TooDee she wanted to draw all the Gabba gang. Waldo did his best.
I hope that everyone had a wonderful and memorable Christmas and holiday season.
*I will do a separate post about the cookies.
