Christmas 2015

I decided this year that it was a sign I was a real adult when my response to the question, "are you ready for Christmas?" became "as ready as I'll ever be this year."

This year's Christmas season was really fun in a lot of ways.  It was Dellie's first year of really understanding how Jesus fit into the whole season, and was very much excited and impatient for Christmas day to arrive the whole month.

We also did spend the month waiting impatiently ourselves for either a job to show up or some divine help knowing if we needed to pack up our lives and move into our parents' basement.  Thankfully, the answer came just in time to be a wonderful Christmas present - Josh did get the job here in Phoenix we were hoping for.  We found out December 22nd, and it will be a really good fit for where we are at right now. It's a contract position that will last through May (just enough time to have a baby), and pays almost double what most of Josh's fellow graduates are making out of college (just enough money to afford a baby).  We are really relieved and see how God has taken care of the details with this job and what it will provide for us over the next few months as we transition into the workforce world and into becoming a family of four.

So, Christmas! We did do some fun things even though each day we found ourselves stressed to the noggin not knowing what our future was going to look like.

There were three things we wanted to make happen over the month - gingerbread house making, seeing Christmas lights, and going on a snow hunt.

Gingerbread houses were just as much of a success with Dellie this year as they were last year. I was also smart enough not to plan the mass sugar intake right before nap time. We got to do them with my parents as well as some friends, making it all the more merrier.

And we went and saw Christmas lights not once, not twice, but three times! Our first excursion was to a park up in Scottsdale that also doubles as a train museum.  Dellie was beyond herself when she saw a real train completely decked out, and loved taking a train ride through lighted scenes of all sorts of Christmas-y things. We did learn a valuable lesson - don't go to a popular Christmas event the last weekend before the holiday - you will have to wait in line for a very, very long time.

The second and third Christmas light excursions were to neighborhoods throughout Phoenix that pride themselves on going completely all out, including a walk through one backyard that is turned into the story of Jesus' birth. Dellie's favorites were one house that added a third story castle and another neighborhood that offered horse-drawn carriage rides up and down the street.

And, of course, no Christmas of ours is complete without a homemade tree! This year we went simple (easy up, easy down) with a yarn made one along with a few treasured (and lightweight) ornaments to hang along the string.

Christmas day was another small, low-key sort of day (like Thanksgiving) with a lot of opening gifts, skyping, and making a mini Christmas dinner.

It was precious watching her gasp after opening each and every present.

Our gift to Dellie this year was a whole slew of flowers for her to kill grow all by herself. Getting to paint all the pots her favorite shades of pink, purple, and yellow was an added bonus.

Helping make Christmas breakfast waffles with Dad. Sideways glances included.

One-upping our bacon-wrapped Thanksgiving turkey with a propane-torched ham. It was delicious.

And lastly, we finished off the Christmas trifecta with a trip up to Flagstaff the next day. It was, unfortunately, not as snowy as we were hoping, and we were delayed over an hour on our drive by two traffic accidents on the road and a combined 30 minute line at the McDonald's bathroom/order counter. The icy cold wind we experienced more than made up for the lack of powder, and we still were able to do some sledding and have a snowball fight with the leftover snow. It was truly wonderful for us adults to experience below freezing temperatures again (we both are ridiculously fond of all things winter and snow), and we were tickled that our Hawaiian born, desert raised daughter is developing just as much of a fondness herself.

Someone was kind enough to leave an intact sled at the park for us ;)

The rest of the season has been been spent getting our world ready for a whole lot of changes coming in 2016. We've been cleaning out closets and storage and getting wardrobes ready for jobs and growing bellies :)

How was your Christmas? Hope it was also a wonderful time!