Honestly, I don't remember a whole lot about the week of Christmas, so I'll probably mostly just post the pictures I took of our decorations. Chrisser and I were so excited to have an apartment this year that we could decorate! Last year we had just gotten married 2 weeks before Christmas and didn't have our own apartment until January. So we had fun this year. The thing we were most excited about was that we found a 6-foot-tall artificial tree at Walmart for just $20! So we bought it, of course.
And we didn't even have to buy any of the things we put on it! Chrisser had bought the lights a couple years ago on an after-Christmas sale, I've had the star for as long as I can remember, my grandma gave me the skirt several years ago when she was cleaning things out, and she gave us the tinsel and ornaments as bridal shower gifts last year (she also gave us several other things for the bridal shower and wedding--thanks Grandma!!!).
The tree went up on Thanksgiving Day because we were just so excited, but we made ourselves wait until the next Monday to put everything else up for Family Home Evening. Everything we put up was stuff that we already had been collecting over the years.
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| Chrisser had lots of fun stuffing the sleigh with pinecones... |
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| I never actually got around to arranging this display. This is just how they ended up when I pulled everything out of the box. |
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| Don't mind the mess on the table... |
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| This will (eventually) be an Advent Calendar. I started making it just before Thanksgiving but never finished. |
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| The minion is playing Joseph because Chrisser decided that Joseph had to be a shepherd since the set didn't come with a shepherd. I also love that the donkey (far left) is smiling for the camera :) |
So those were our many decorations. As far as what we did, this year it was my family's turn to have us. We went up for the Christmas Eve party that my mom's side has every year. My mom was in charge of planning it this year, and she delegated the craft to me. I'm not the most creative person ever, but I had seen ideas for popsicle stick ornaments on Pinterest and figured that would be easy enough. I pre-painted a bunch of sticks and then everyone just had to glue them together at the party. I was actually pretty dead at the party. I had thrown up at 2:30 that morning... But it was just the once, so I figured I could go, haha. So I was alive, but very tired and afraid to eat. Anyway. Sorry, tmi...
That night we slept at my parents' house so we could do Christmas morning with my family. It seemed that, yet again, I was the most excited one of my siblings. My mom finally went and woke everyone up at like 8am. Chrisser and I had been awake for quite some time by then :). Thankfully we were on the hide-a-bed right next to the video game TV, so Chrisser was able to play games while we waited. The rest of the morning after presents was pretty chill. My family doesn't do much on Christmas Day (unlike Chrisser's; bit of a culture shock for him) except that my mom makes a nice dinner and sometimes my dad's parents are there for that, which was the case this year. Chrisser and I came back to Provo right after dinner (which was in the early afternoon) because it was Chrisser's turn to not feel terribly well. Thankfully he never actually got sick.
Then right after Christmas I started a busy couple of weeks at work and Chrisser watched a couple entire cartoon series on Netflix and Hulu while he waited for school to start back up again :)
