... A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Happy Christmas to all!  It's been a couple of weeks, but I have just barely finished taking down the tree and the lights and the wreath and the cards so it has lingered a little while, which is fine.  We didn't even get our Christmas tree until like two weeks into December (since we were going to be gone to Disneyland and didn't want it to die of thirst or perhaps light our unattended house on fire somehow), so it was nice to let it carry on into the New Year a little.  (Also, and this is just a little moment of venting, those little light clips are pretty handy, and some of them stayed put, but others were SO resistant to stick to their respective surfaces... And THEN a couple of them peeled the paint off when I tried to take them down?!?  Whatev.)  SO we had a very nice Christmas Day and also a great New Year, so here are some pictures and a little report.

Christmas Eve!  I am a present.

We had a delightful Christmas Eve dinner with lots of varied items and watched Edward Scissorhands.

Christmas morning!  Santa Claus came and brought many exciting things.  I love that LOST book so so so much, and Santa always has such great taste in neckwear.  Various other musical DVDs also appeared here and there throughout the day as well (one was in the fridge).

 Santa Claus also much know that Julie really likes The Nightmare Before Christmas and Harry Potter and Wii Lego games and Dumbo.  Also, again with the great taste in neckwear.

We finally bought some semi-decent stockings this year!  One of these days we'll have some kind of mantel to hang them on.

My stocking included this killer do-rag.  SO HARDCORE.

We saw these in Disneyland a few years ago and Julie very much wanted them but decided against it.  She's never been able to forget about them, but we haven't found them in any parks since that trip.  Turns out they're not really available anymore, but thanks to the internet, they finally appeared under our tree, much to her delight.

This is the t-shirt for the race Julie's sister Marci organized.  I did the art for the design so she sent us a couple of the shirts.  It's looks great!

After we awoke and opened our presents, we went to church, which was really nice on Christmas morning.  Then we came home and spent a lot of time together and went over to Mom and Dad's house in the afternoon for very many delicious foods and an impromptu Christmas concert.

'Tis Christmas.

On Christmas night we had a slumber party in the living room and watched movies in the glow of the Christmas lights.  Turns out the rug isn't quite enough padding to qualify as a mattress, but it was still fun.

It was a great Christmas!  I daresay it was the best ever.  The next week I basically worked only two days, and then had another nice long weekend (I had a few days off left to use up), so it was a really great break.  Unfortunately right after Christmas I came down with a wee cold, which The Wife shortly after caught from me.  It always takes her a little while longer than me to recover from those sorts of things, so we spent the vacation watching a lot of movies (some terrible, but it's okay when it's from the Redbox and only cost approximately $1) and relaxing and doing things like this:

It's a giant 1000-piece puzzle of a map of Disneyland from Santa Claus!  It took us a couple of evenings, and it's a little harder than it looks, especially because the picture on the box is so tiny and the puzzle art itself is very very detailed (like, it includes every store and Guest Services kiosk, pretty much everything except the toilets, and maybe even a couple of those).  But it was fun because if you're familiar with the layout of Disneyland you kind of know where to tentatively put the pieces until it's time to put them all together.  We enjoyed it so much that Julie blogged about it too, which you can read here.

Julie is holding the remains of her Star Wars Marshmallow Lollipop.

Then we had New Year's weekend, which was also really nice.  We had more family things at Cami's house, where we had pizza and played games and visited, and then we all played Kinect Dance Central and learned that we're pretty great dancers.  Julie's cold really hit after that, so we took it easy for the rest of the weekend.

New Year's flowers!  It had just been a while since The Wife had a nice bouquet.

The New Year's Baby came!

This weekend we decided to have a do-over of some of our New Year's weekend since Julie was under the weather for a lot of it.  We stayed up until midnight last night (sure, we do that on occasion anyway, but still), and tonight we finally had our Full English Breakfast, with bubbly to follow.

It's so delicious!

Perhaps one of our favorite new traditions.

And that's about it!  It's actually been a pretty long week since regular life started again, but it's nice to go back and review the festivities.  It was fun to read about all the other activities our out-of-town family were up to, and we love our Christmases together.  I'm a little bummed we haven't had much snow this year (so far), but it's still early!  We finally took down our tree and lights and everything this week, but I figure since, like I said, we didn't put up our tree until mid-December anyway, it was okay to let it linger a few days into January.  I even feel like I listened to an acceptable amount of Christmas music this year, which is very nice.  At the moment I kind of can't believe we're already a week into January, but I think 2012 has a lot of promise.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to one and all! XD