Merry Christmas!!!

Merry Christmas, readers!  I hope your holidays are filled with love and happiness and good health! 

I thought, perhaps, if you're snowed in, or in the process of getting snowed in, that you might enjoy a peek into Christmas at our house...

Here is a photo of our Christmas tree 2010! I decided to go white/silver/clear only this year, except for yes, 3 red ornaments and one brown ornament that will always be on my tree, no matter what the theme that year...  I have a clear red ball with a silver "K" filled with tinsel that my dad made for me when I was small.  I have a red heart that I bought in honor of my dad after he died.  And there are two homemade ornaments that J made with his kids when they were small - one is a painted Santa Claus and one is a gingerbread man. 

This is the inside of St. Catherine of Siena's Church in Cedar Grove.  It's not "our" church and it's not even the church we used to go to for Midnight Mass.  I had a bit of a falling out with the church of my childhood so J and I joined the church of my earlier childhood.  But now we go to non-Midnight Mass at St. Catherine's, at 10pm on Christmas Eve.  To my everlasting annoyance, Midnight Mass is no longer at midnight.  But they still have a half-hour of Christmas carols before Mass and some other man and I sang along with the choir this year!  No one else did, but we did!  This church does have some meaning for us - our nieces got married here, our great niece was baptized here and this is the church J's sister attends.  So even though it's not "ours," we enjoy Mass here...

This is our beautiful baby great niece, E.  Isn't she the cutest!?!?!?  This was Christmas Day, about 1pm, just after she took a little nap, and after her parents opened SO many presents for her!  She got so many outfits and baby toys and books and tree ornaments and...  I got her a cute pink silk dress that they might have her wear at the wedding in April, and a cute purple sweatsuit that she can wear now, and Santa brought her the same toy we chose, but apparently it's the one she chose to play with over all others, so ours will be kept at Grandma's Mimi's and PopPop's...

Here's our beautiful daughter M with her fiance S, in front of our tree yesterday afternoon.  I feel for them.  M is so conscious and thoughtful about spending time with both sides of the family, and S's parents are divorced, too. This means they have FOUR families to try and see on the holiday.  And unfortunately both sides on each side don't spend a lot of time together at all - little to NONE - so they are on the move on Christmas Day.  To make it worse, S had to work!  But we did spend some time with them and that's the best gift they could give us!

Here's a photo of the three of us, taken at arm's length in our library just before M left for S's mom's house!  We lent her our Subaru, and she left her Scion TC in our driveway.  THANK GOODNESS since it's blizzarding now and her teeny sports car is simply a rolling death trap!  At least the Subaru has 4-wheel drive.  She's home, safe and sound, though, after only a brief trip to the gym this morning, before the snow got too bad.

Here's our annual couple's photo.  J already dressed down into a sweat jacket; he's not much for staying dressed up if he doesn't have to, so pardon the mix of casual and business casual we have going in the photo!  Santa brought J a TomTom GPS system, and surprisingly he didn't whine about how he doens't want one of these, and why did I Santa bother bringing him one...  He did ask if I knew how to operate one and well, we'll just learn together!  I got a beautiful pashmina shawl, some gift cards, a Thomas Kincaide mug, and a computer lap desk from J Santa.  I must have been a good girl this year!



More photos to come, as I go through my camera...