Wait— what day is it?? A very merry recap!!

 Hi!!

I missed you!

How are you?

I am coming out from under one thousand (conservative estimate) Hershey kiss/M&M/pretzel candies, sort of stumbling around and blinking my eyes like a newborn kitten. Only I am a middle aged lady who has also been drinking too many old fashioneds. Not as cute.

Some pics from Christmas Eve eve, uploaded in random order because Blogger:

1. The cutest little bite out a of dinner roll

2. All of the holiday dress options I offered Minnie for our Elks Club night out

3. Table chaos

4. FANCY DUDES

5. CHHEEESE

6. Even the elk is merry

7. What Minnie actually wore: a too-small, stained licensed character dress.

8. Fancy Jack

9. Show choir hair! My dress had Christmas presents on the skirt, and I wish I took a pic because I wore it again on Christmas, and the zipper ripped. NOT FROM THE PRETZEL CANDY AND OLD FASHIONEDS.

10. I was merry, apparently:

11. This is my ideal supper club order: a wedge salad (with French ideally, but they brought both blue cheese crumbles and blue cheese, so whatever), a baked potato, a shrimp cocktail, and an old fashioned.

Even though she is a very jolly elf, we put Minnie to bed and made cookies after dinner without her. 

Things escalated quickly

Christmas Eve:

It was lovely and cozy— we went to the Capitol to see the Christmas tree and made a huge dinner. That’s it.

Well! Except! We did our food-themed white elephant, which was hilarious. I ended up with a box of Fannie May pixies, and Coop got a YARD of Twix, but the other offerings were less clear-cut winners, you know? (We got Minnie a food-shaped Sqishmallow, and she was exempt from swapping.)

 

The littles left cookies for Santa, and all 5 of them went to bed early, which was good, because as prepared as Santa thinks he is, there’s still a bunch to do last minute. Notably, Minnie dictated her note for Santa to Coop, which was darling. And! She could not draw a picture of Santa, so she drew dog poop (KIDS ARE SO WEIRD).

MAGIC-READY, just add five kids:

Christmas day was lazy and delightful

I got awesome, thoughtful, wonderful gifts, but the very best was Harry’s horror at this sweatshirt

Minnie wanted a cauldron from Santa, and the big guy came through

OF COURSE we wore matching jammies that our elves on the shelf delivered on Christmas Eve, but I only got one kind of bad pic. Hopefully we all wear them again on NYE.

We just sort of sat around and ate homemade cinnamon rolls and opened gifts and played with gifts and admired gifts all day— it was delightful

ALSO LOOK AT THESE AMAZING EARRINGS JUST CASUALLY TOSSED IN A PILE OF OTHER STUFF TO OPEN

On the day after, we purged.

On the 26th, Ben took down all of our Christmas decorations and tossed 2 trees to the curb and boxed 2 more awhile I baked gingerbread house pieces for our annual competition (so much more fun than buying kits because everything smells amazing, tastes great, and is all wonky from imperfect rolling, which adds another challenge). I also made incredibly stiff royal icing this year because I bought it from the cookie decorating store and just had to add water— 10/10; will do this again.

No treeeees!!

Competition ready:

All of the houses stood up this year—- except Ben and Coop’s, which FB liked the best anyway **eye roll**

Last night, we went to a fancy supper club to celebrate my dad’s birthday, which meant MOAR old fashioneds. Someday, I will be back to my teetotaling ways, but it’s almost NYE (I think), so I am going to need a second.

Happy end-of-year slothdom, friends.