Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I may be a bit behind in blogging about the holidays, but today is Epiphany and still technically part of Christmas-- so I'm not too late!

Today after mass we drove to a family friend's house for the annual Epiphany party.
They recently completed an addition on their house, and some friends who used to live in Germany did a traditional Epiphany blessing of the home, which was lovely!
(Singing "We Three Kings" with a raw throat in the cold did not sound quite as lovely, however! lol!).

Surprisingly, this Christmas I was not all that much of a camera monster. I took tons of pictures of people, but most of the time was spent making memories and not fiddling with the camera!




However, I did have some time to have fun with bokeh (the fuzzy circles of light made by the Christmas lights in the background of this picture).



I also got a lovely scarf and lots of candy. And our family present (aside from the news about the baby, of course), was a project that we've been working on for a couple of months. We turned extra space in the garage into a nice little room for exercise equipment. That's right-- we have our own personal gym! We even put the TV out there, for extra incentive.

This picture is too cute not to share. This summer, we bought an oversized map to hang on the wall in the schoolroom. My little brother loves that thing. He loves pointing to countries (or shooting Nerf guns at them.......) and having you name each one-- and the describe every last little thing that you know about said country. All he asked for for Christmas was a globe. :)




A couple days after Christmas, we had the more-than-annual family get-together. I think we counted 44 people, all of whom stayed at least two days. This time we were only missing eleven people! My family is CRAZY and AWESOME and I love hanging out with them!!!

The above is a picture of the White Elephant exchange. In the package I made, I put a Post-It note which said "Haha, you get nothing!" inside of a gift box. My aunt laughed and was actually about to throw it away when I told her to lift the note up because there were earrings underneath it in the box. :)



We played board games, Crack the Case, 3D tic-tac-toe, rubik's cubes, the levitating top that my brother built, puzzle word games, card games, Taboo, and Pinochle. And many, many more. :)







Of course, the girls had to dress up in my epic costumes. :) That's just a necessity. Here's a couple of snapshots. It was freezing out so the photoshoot lasted all of five minutes.


We also did Christmas crackers! I only knew about them because of HP. In one of the first books, Dumbledore gets a great big hat and pretend wand out of his magical cracker. Apparently crackers are very popular in the UK. I wanted to try making some, but we couldn't find supplies for a decent price in the US, so Mom just ordered a huge pack of pre-made ones.

We still have paper crowns and joke cards in every corner of the house!

What's orange and rhymes with parrot?

CARROT!

Hahahahaha.... eh.


These are some of the most exquisite cookies that I've ever seen. Some good friends dropped them off at our house secretly (as in, the cookies wandered inside in the arms of one of our cousins and we didn't realize it until ten minutes later!). It felt almost like a crime to eat them-- but not quite. They were delicious and flavored with rosewater!


I hope you enjoyed this little peak into our celebrations! May you all have a blessed New Year. :)