a week ago.

Oliver received an early Christmas gift this year. A virus. He reached his height of sadness/sickness last Friday morning when he crawled aimlessly until he found a heap of blankets to lie on and promptly fell asleep on the living room floor. Luckily he perked up Friday evening (he was so happy to be feeling better that he just started crawling in fast circles around the kitchen). He slept a lot (3 hour naps and sleeping in past 9 a.m.) for a few days which was nice but still wasn't totally himself for Christmas which was a little sad. He's finally fully recovered and having fun discovering all of the new toys lying around.

christmas cookies.

The post-Christmas mess is starting to disappear. Most of the cookies and treats have been devoured.

In addition to sugar cookies and these delicious peppermint patty surprise chocolate chunk cookie bars (phew) highly recommended by my sister, I made four different kinds of cookies this year.

Peanut butter kiss cookies (made with Hershey's Bliss), chocolate peppermint bark cookies, candied orange slice cookies (a family recipe and one of my favorites), and salty chocolate nutella thumbprints (a new recipe I tried this year found here).

I thoroughly enjoyed each one. (And will definitely be taking part in another Lettuce Eat Cake weight loss contest in January.)

here we come a-wassailing...

We decided to go old school (circa 1850) with our neighbor gifts this year. My sister-in-law had made us a yummy wassail mix a few years ago so I used her recipe to mix up several batches for friends. I packaged some in jars and some in bags from last year's screen printed neighbor gift. And threw on a bundle of cinnamon sticks for fun.

We probably should have sung a few old-timey carols when we delivered these...

nativities.

I had fun expanding my nativity collection when I was in Peru. I couldn't pass up all those alpacas.

Alpaca! Llama! And a very unswaddled baby Jesus.

A mariachi band as the three wise men.

Peruvian jungle nativity. How could I resist baby Jesus in a canoe? Not to mention a SLOTH! And whatever that other animal is. Any guesses?

One of my favorites...we picked this up in Germany and it plays music.

From Italy.

Germany, Thailand, Israel, Peru

For the kids.

brookside gardens

Our favorite light display in the area is at Brookside Gardens. (Bonus: It's near the Temple so you can hit two displays in one night.) The lights here seem to get better every year. Skip the zoo lights and go here. It's ten times better! It's a walk-through display and the kids have so much fun running through all the lights and looking for their favorites. They have some really unique garden-themed lights as well as fun animals (dolphins and sea monsters jumping out of fountains). There is also a train display in the greenhouse.

temple lights.

We drove up to Maryland to see the Temple lights on Tuesday. We left as soon as Amelia got home from school.  (Ben was working at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and met us there.) We managed to avoid traffic and arrived at dusk. The sky was so beautiful and there weren't many people there. The kids loved looking at the big nativity outside and all of the small nativities from around the world. They also have a lot of beautifully decorated trees. And of course lights!