Wednesday, December 23, 2015

'Twas the night before Christmas Eve

Christmas is here!  And this year I'm taking an approach to celebrating that's, well, let's just say, not super conventional.  Instead of flying out to spend Christmas with family, I stayed in Seattle to celebrate with Amanda (who came up from Denver) and Justin.  The plan was to do Christmas at my house, then go out to Bainbridge Island to see Justin's family, and then fly out on Christmas night for a mid-winter trip to Puerto Rico and New York.

As I'm writing this, the plan is already in motion, and so far it's going roughly as expected, though not quite as linearly.  But before I jump into those details, let's look back to Wednesday night, when things were calm and bright.  I worked from home and was able to get the house all cleaned up and festive for the holiday.  Amanda's flight landed around 7pm, and shortly after we got home from the airport Justin came over and we had a beautiful little Christmas Eve's Eve that consisted of eating meat pies from the shop down the street and comparing stocking traditions.

Then we all retired to bed (but not before laying out some "Santa"-brought stocking stuffers!) so as to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for the adventures ahead!


I love how my Christmas tree turned out this year.  It looks so festive with gifts under it.
I wrapped mine in red paper with gold stripes or filigrees.
Justin wraps exclusively in brown paper with string.
And Amanda brings in more variety with two types of paper and ribbons.
Out of the three of us, my family was the only one who had really fixed stocking-related traditions.  We each
had our own stocking (as indicated by the trim), and we used our stockings to stake out our seats before going to bed.
Because we didn't expect to be together on the real Christmas morning, we put our stockings out the night before
in hopes that Santa might read our minds and come early.
Spoiler alert -- he DID come early!  This was Amanda's stocking post-stuffing.
This is Justin's stocking.  (I didn't take a picture of mine.)
I don't have many Christmas knick-knacks -- basically just this one Danish solder that Granny got a long time ago.
I put red berries into my water-bag vases from China.
The cards on the bannister, and the berries in the garlands are a nice touch.
And I kept changing out the lanterns for candlesticks with glass chimneys -- only
the tapers burnt so quickly that I had to go back to the pillars in the lanterns.

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