Seeing that I wrote a post mid-November telling y’all how to do this holiday season right, I figured I owed you an update. So this was me pre-Thanksgiving planning it all out. By God, I was going to do it all and do it so well.
And then… my sweet, gentle, funny 6 year old daughter managed to somehow get into so much trouble. She fell against a brick wall when playing basketball, she shoved a bead up her nose just as we were about to have a dinner party, she got sick and has really high fever, her neck swell up, more fever, Thanksgiving in the hospital as she had emergency surgery to drain an abscess followed by a fall down the stairs and big gash under the chin…. It seemed like it would never ever end. My husband had a sinus infection which caused his nose to swell up so much he looked like some unfortunate boxer. It was not at all what I had planned.
Oh well. We rolled with it. Had Thanksgiving dinner several days later. Put up Christmas decorations which took me pretty much all of December to complete. Ran around the stores looking for the damn Fingerlings and LOL dolls. Didn’t get my sister-in-law a gift at all! When I finally mailed off all the gifts, it was 1.5 weeks till Christmas and the line was horrendous. Well. There’s always next year.
Oh, way under ordered the cards. Ugh.
I had decided on Candyland theme for the kitchen – breakfast room area. Luckily I had made the peppermint candy in September and made the whole family paint them! Gum drops under the tree were already done as well. Unfortunately I am not one of those people that puts decorations up in a day or two and calls it a day. I zhoosh like endlessly.
There were lollipops and candy canes next to Santa at the entry as well. I didnt get nearly as many photos as I wanted to. Next year! This was our main tree.
And then I mucked around the rest of the house, zhooshing up garlands as flower arrangements and buying more greens. I love the pine smell. Love. Took me forever to find a tartan tablecloth that fit our table, ended up buying 3 smaller ones to cover ours. This is a bad photo but how cute are those little nutcracker teddy bears guarding my foyer?
We saw Nutcracker with girls, made gingerbread houses and countless cookies. Ate too much frosting and had fun finding our elves. And then Santa came!
We had a lovely Christmas Eve with friends, again no pictured! 🙁 And enjoyed the traditional Estonian Christmas dinner of pork, potatoes, sauerkraut and blood sausages. And on Christmas Day, we woke up to the most perfect, magic white Christmas morning ever.
It was perfect. It wasn’t but it was. I had a cold and Gary was exhausted but as we sat by the fire, drank hot coffee and watched the girls tear into their gifts and shout with delight, I thought how perfect it was. Just as I had planned. 🙂 I hope yours was, too.
xo
-haiku
