Sunday, December 18, 2011

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

I have been SO excited for Christmas this year! I love it always--the magical lights, pretty songs, shopping, family time, Christmas movies...it's all the best. But this year I have been especially excited. The following are major contributors in my excitement:

1. I learned last year how fun it is to have your own apartment and tree to decorate. I was itching to put up our decorations as soon as the Halloween ones (which really just consist of a Happy Halloween sign and some spiders) were put away. I waited until the day my Thanksgiving break started, then couldn't wait anymore and up they went!

2. My family is going to be together! For the past three years my parents have been living overseas and they have not been able to come home for Christmas, so everyone has been mostly doing their own thing. This year they are coming in the day after Christmas, along with my sister and her family from Minnesota, and my Grandma from Arizona. We will all spend a week together in Mesquite, and I am so excited!

3. I now have 3 MORE DAYS of school left! YAY! I love being on a school schedule.

We have done some fun Christmas activities so far. We have watched some Christmas movies, and spent a couple nights driving around looking at the lights with our good friends. We also went to a fun holiday fashion show at my sister-in-law Kelli's hair school. It's been so fun!
Yesterday we had our annual Christmas celebration with Emily and Joe. This year my family picked names for our gift exchange, so we didn't do presents. Instead, we decided to go to the Temple.

When we came out of the Temple, there was a gorgeous sunset. It was so pretty!

After the Temple, we went to Pizza Pie Cafe. For those of you who don't live around here, it is a delicious buffet of different kinds of pizzas, pasta, and salad. My favorites are the Spudolicious pizza, which is pizza with potatoes on it...so good, and the cookie dough dessert pizza. It was so so good. Well worth the 3,000 calories we surely consumed.

After the Pizza Pie Cafe, we came home to build gingerbread houses. We had a good time building them. We also came to the realization that there is a reason the Walmart gingerbread houses are priced at 7 dollars. They are definitely not the most attractive or user friendly houses. The frosting was impossible to use. The houses turned out nothing like the picture on the box! Here are both of our pictures with our finished houses:
Notice the creepy demon eyes on our gingerbread man.
Joe admiring their work.
After we made the houses we started playing a game called Pounce. About 20 minutes later we looked over at our houses and saw this:
Our house was leaning and about to tip over


Their house had already tipped over.

Oh well! We had a good time making them. Later that night Willie and I went to Macey's to pick up some groceries, and looked at all of the gingerbread houses on display for their annual gingerbread house competition. They were amazing! Maybe next year :)