Holidays, Week 1

I always have whole jumbo walnuts around for My Sweets.

Woohoo... SNOW! And finally some action for the mini dust pan.

Five teacher gifts with kid-made ornaments and Starbucks gift cards.  

Making almond-maple granola with the littles. It goes fast in this house!

Bleu decorating gift bags for her three besties.

  

I am always wowed by our church's Giving Tree program.

Ollie goes to work -- coasting through Times Square on Daddy's shoulder.

They meet us later for the annual "Gallery Night" at Buby and Bleu's school.

These boys!

Love my twinkle lights. I cry a little bit when they come down.

Bleu stands under our hanging advent bags... reading the clue of the day.

Treasure hunts are my fave.

Two ornaments not made by my offspring.

Clementines, of course.

I absolutely adore her backwards Y.

We've been burning five candles every night -- can you tell?

I make coffee and he gets a head start on wrapping.

Best $1.99 ever spent. Two boxes of DIY animals at Rite Aid.

While I nap Tom makes me his "Grandma" Barber's cherry pie recipe from scratch!

Spreading reindeer food and gold glitter around the property.

And in Ollie's curls.

Our Christmas Eve at home is always on my birthday, December 21st.

Cookies for Santa.

It's 2 a.m., but we finished.

Christmas morning on December 22nd.

Love. 

Happy 2014. Hope you had wonderful holidays! I'm not sure why it's taken me so long to post these pictures -- except that I've been staying mostly unplugged in the evenings. My brain wants one more week of vacation. Anyway, I'm excited to be back. I'll share our holiday in three parts.

The month of December was pretty awesome to us. First of all, nobody was sick. (That's a biggie!) Also, I managed to stay on track with all of our traditions in the weeks leading up to the annual road trip. There was lots of reading, hunting (treasures), hiding (elves), decking, baking, buying, making, mailing, gifting, packing, dancing, visiting, and relaxing. Somehow we got it all done this year and struck a chord somewhere between hyper and chill. My Sweets had two full weeks off work, which is a rarity, and we didn't set a single alarm in that time. We just coasted into the new year.