Holiday Happenings

yesterday we celebrated christmas with my mom's side of the family. the "party" was held at my grandparent's house and we had a blast. i have 3 girl cousins that are one year yonger than me and two of them were there and we had a great time getting caught up and telling college stories. they are like sisters to me! christmas dinner was amazing with waaaaaayyyyy too much food! yummy! us "kids" excused ourselves and went into the living room to relax until it was time to open gifts. i just love my family! we all get along so well, so the time we waited to open presents seemed to fly by as laughter and stories were shared all around.
finally it was gift time. my uncle shareds some christmas reflections and played part of the Messiah on CD, which i have never seen, but the music was enjoyable. then us cousins exchanged gifts. i recieved the Bethany Dillian CD and a oh so soft and cozy pair of socks from my arizona dwelling cousin ariel. from grandma and grandpa i got a pair of dress pants and dress shirt along with a check- good stuff! i had to tease grandpa and ask him if he picked out the outfit. he assured me that he hadn't. :) the adults had a white elephant gift exchange with the theme of a mug with a pair of socks and that got kind of fiesty! of course we had the usual wrapping paper fight to end the festivities.
the rest of the day was spent relaxing and eating more food. definitely need to bundle up and go running the rest of this week! ariel, rachel and i , all spanish minors, had a good time attempting to watch part of the Lion King in spanish, a gift that rachel received. i found that the nala/simba duet "can you feel the love tonight" has the same romantic effect in spanish as it does in english. :) the highlight of the day was probably when 9 of us played spoons, including my grandma and grandpa who had never played before. grandma was so thrilled to finally learn how to play! "who would have thought that at age 73 i would be sitting here playing spoons! i am so glad that you taught me!" etc. she got all flustered the faster we went and it was hilarious. grandpa was more calm and just kind of sat there watching all of us crazy cooks, but i could tell he was having a good time too.
grandma kept accusing my brother of cheating and picking up more than one card at a time. he insisted that he wasn't and the funny thing is that we caught grandma at the end of one round with 6 cards in her hand!! she also thought that us 3 girl cousins were cheating, which we were, but we hid it from here pretty well. we also rediscovered the trick of putting spoons on your nose so we experimented with that for awhile, trying to get the spoon from our noses into our mouths- try it sometime. flicking spoons is also a fun thing to do and we had spoon fights for awhile. needless to say we all got kind of rowdy, but i think i laughed off at least a few calories from the holidy food.
God has blessed me with an amazing family that loves God and each other. sure we have our differences,etc. but the fact that most of the family was there (minus my cousin in PA and aunt/uncle's family in VA) for over 8 hours and we all had so much fun speaks for itself. i have such an amazing christian heritage that i all too often take for granted. having christmas with my family is big enough gift for me!