I enjoy my Christmas wrap-up posts, but this year the time got away from me. I’m not really sure how. Perhaps it was the 23 people we hosted for a full turkey dinner two days after Christmas. I still always marvel that people trust me to cook a turkey when I don’t eat it myself. I hear that it was good though. I’m impressed that I was aiming for everything to be ready for 2pm, and the last item was done at 1:50!

A deadline that I didn’t hit was my December 1st goal for completing my Christmas shopping. I didn’t even get close. I was about sixty percent done in the middle of November and got cocky, thinking I might even be done early. Then it all fell apart. I picked up the last of the planned presents on December 21. And then Charles did a last-minute run on Christmas Eve to pick up some late-breaking requests for Santa. But, the smiles on Christmas morning were worth the late trip.

The Christmas baking wasn’t just late this year. It was nonexistent. I thought that I could do it the last few days before Christmas, but somehow those days passed in a blur. I made a batch of sugar cookies for a Christmas party that we never went to, but that was the extent of it. And they hardly count since they were from a mix. But they went fast. We didn’t even have any left on Christmas Eve for Santa, so Charles picked up some tiny cupcakes while he was out fulfilling the aforementioned last-minute Santa requests.

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This year, instead of a gnome under the tree for me, there was a zombie gnome for Charles. It’s going to look lovely in the garden next to my zombie gnome. I did get a book about how to survive a gnome attack. We may need it with two zombie gnomes in the garden.

I once again enlisted the help of crafts to keep the kidlets occupied. It started with tiny little beads, which were a right PITA. It soon moved onto tiny little elastics, which were less of a pain, but required me to sort the mixed bag of 600+ of them into their respective colour piles.

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Abby learned how to play Crazy 8s. I relearned how to play Euchre. I may have also taught Abby how to play blackjack. And poker. Can you guess who got a new deck of cards for Christmas?

I got my baby fix on Christmas day with my three week old niece. I felt a little sorry to the rest of my family who didn’t get to hold her much. But I wasn’t giving up my baby time! And they get to see her more often anyway, so if you count up total minutes held, I’m sure they all come out ahead.

We waited for the snow to come back so that we could use the sled on our annual trip to see the Wonders of Winter light show at the park. But the snow never came. On the 30th, we finally made the trek with the stroller and hoped that the ground was frozen enough. Thankfully it was. The lights weren’t quite the same without the snow, but girls still seemed to enjoy them.

The girls are already asking when it’s going to be Christmas again. I guess it was a win!