A Day in the Life: Holiday 2013

This was a strange holiday season with Thanksgiving being really late. It really just seemed to throw everyone off their mark. We did have some snow at one point, but then it promptly got back up to 68 and rainy so it wiped it all away. We got a tree and decorated the house in almost an identical manner as last year. Hence no pics taken. Ellie was definitely more into decorating the tree and picking it out. We had wanted to make it up to a place where we might actually pick it out and cut it down, but we will put that on the list for next year.

I did successfully make Christmas cookies with Ellie and her friend Valentina this year. I was typically over ambitious and had made a double batch of gingerbread to roll out into men as well as the sugar cookies and peppermint oreos. I had visions of plates of cookies with 3 different types of cookies going to neighbors, school teachers, work people etc. We successfully got through the sugar cookies and I made the peppermint oreos and called it a day. No fancily decorated plates went out but more like some tupperware containers to close friends only. The gingerbread (which is my favorite) was too dry to roll out. The funniest part was when the kids were decorating the cookies, Valentina kept "tasting" the sprinkles. Her green mouth kept giving her away!

We also made a trip into the city to do some holiday festivities. We took the train into the city with our friends the Jourdys. Ellie and Serene wrote letters to Santa and we brought them to Macy's to put into mailbox. We checked out the windows as well. We dared a visit to 30 Rock, but that was a horrible idea. It was a warm Saturday in December and we basically got stuck in a crowd of people that even I couldn't take. All in all it was an obscene amount of work, but it did make me feel like a New Yorker to check out the stuff. But I will NOT do it again with kids for a long time.

Ellie also had a holiday party of sorts at her school. It was very conveniently timed at 11:00 in the morning so I was unfortunately unable to make it. Mike did fortunately. Ellie had to learn Jingle Bell Rock and it was really fun to sing it with her. She learned the words really quickly and the song plays very frequently so she sang it a lot!

Ellie mailing her letter to Santa. I guess there are one of these mailboxes in every Macys so we probably didn't have to drag her down to the flagship one that was unbelievably overcrowded...