First lets start off with a few Christmas crafts/decorations that Jackson and I made to get into the Christmas spirit. I saw the snowman refrigerator on Pintrest and just had to do it. It was so simple and so cute. The tree decorations we attached to our family gifts and gave them to Grandparents and Aunts and Uncles. Jackson really got a kick out of making them. They're just a bunch of junk we had around the house.
After we got our house nicely decorated we decided to take a 18 hours car ride to St. Louis to spend time with family. We had a great time and the car ride wasn't even bad. Actually Jackson was like a little angel...I couldn't believe how well he did. (The ride home was a different story, but the way there he was perfect!) The picture on the left is the Atlanta skyline...well as best as I could get from the highway. It actually was a lot of fun to get to see different parts of the country that we hadn't ever seen before. We've seens whats between Utah and Missouri about a 1/2 a dozen times, but neither of us had ever seen this part of the country.
We had a lot of fun visiting family in St. Louis and Quincy. We stayed about a week and had a great time relaxing. We even got to take Jackson to the St. Louis Science Center, which he absolutely loved! He still asks me to take him to the airplane museum--The Science Center has an entire section about airplanes & space--one of Jackson's current obsessions. The T-rex & Triceratops behind us are in a battle of sorts and they move so although Jackson really liked looking at them, he was a little concerned to be standing that close to the T-rex.
We left St. Louis on the 22nd...or 23rd...I can't remember and got back home early on the 24th. I was so glad that I did all of our holiday shopping and wrapping before we left. But we were able to have a great Christmas with just the 3 of us. It was a fun time to start a few new traditions. We read Christmas bedtime stories out in front of the Christmas tree and had a traditional Bethlehem type dinner with olives, figs, dates, bread & dipping sauce(not sure if that part was traditional) and a few other things that I can't seem to recall at the moment, on Christmas Eve. Followed by a traditional Middle Eastern Dinner on Christmas Day. For our Middle Eastern dinner we had Sarmale--its vegetable/rice stuffed cabbage or grape leaves. Sarmale is actually what it is called in Romania, its called something different in the Middle East, but to me it was Sarmale. We also had Hummus, babba ganoosh, homemade pita bread, spinach fatyaer, and of course lots and lots of fresh vegetables--again not sure of the authenticity of this portion, but a necessity nonetheless.
On Christmas Day I had been having the feeling all day that we should check with the Missionaries to see if they had any place to go for dinner. Of course I kept putting it off and about 5:30pm I couldn't dismiss the prompting any longer so I texted them and sure enough neither set of Elders had any place to go. I quickly made a few more simple side dishes and the 4 Elders came over at 6:30pm for our Christmas Dinner. I thought that they would stay for dinner and then leave, but I guess I didn't think that through because they didn't really have a lot to do and ended up spending most of the evening with us. They introduced us to all the wonderful videos on lds.org about scriptural events and the life of Christ that we hadn't known about so we watched several short videos, played a game and read Luke 2 together. It was a pretty fun evening. The above is a picture of Jackson taken Christmas morning. Despite the look on his face he really is happy. I'm not sure why, but he has decided that this is the best way to smile--full face squint, eyes closed. He is starting to grow out of it a little bit now, but if you ask him to smile for you you've got about a 60% chance of getting the above pose.
All in all it was a wonderful December! Christmas is so much more fun with a little guy to get all excited about getting presents!
Sounds like fun. We've discovered the peace that comes from having Christmas by ourselves also and the fun traditions we can start in our family. hooray for shared anniversaries. Thanks for updating!
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