Christmas: Part I

Last year JP and I spent both Thanksgiving and Christmas with my family because I was on "new employee probation" and was not able to take any time off. I even had to work a weekend day to make up for having Thanksgiving and Christmas days off! Once my probation was over in January we went to Arizona to visit his family.

This year I had no probation to deal with and plenty of vacation days, and JP, well, he didn't even have a job to deal with so he had as many vacation days as he liked! I asked JP which holiday he wanted to spend with his family, and he responded Christmas. So, we spent Thanksgiving with my family and Christmas with his.

In our premarital counseling, our pastor said that some of the biggest family conflicts come over who you spend the holidays with. In relation to that, a lot of people have asked me how spending Christmas away from my family for the first time was. My response includes something regarding these points:

1. JP's family is great so I loved getting a chance to see how they celebrate Christmas!
2. I am very fortunate my in-laws live in Arizona! I joked with my mom that if they lived in some miserably cold place like Michigan or Alaska, I might have to celebrate Christmas in July with them!
3. Because my family lives just over an hour away we were able to spend the weekend before Christmas and New Years day with them.
4. My family did not pitch a fit or make things difficult.

I have a much longer post I am working on to document our Christmas in Arizona (it was actually supposed to be completed last night but I had a small mishap with dropping an external hard drive and breaking it and thus losing some of the pics I was going to use). However, I do want to go ahead and document our Christmas celebration with my family.

The weekend before Christmas my mom and I got to do a lot of shopping. We also enjoyed the delicious food and snacks my mom had prepared. To quote my mom directly from an email she sent me: "I sure do enjoy planning food when JP comes because he has a wide variety of what he will eat and then he eats enough that I feel it was worth the effort" I suppose you can tell she only had daughters and no sons!

Then after Christmas we spent New Years day with them. I wish we had been able to spend the entire New Years weekend in Decatur, but unfortunately I had to work that weekend. We actually celebrated Christmas and exchanged gifts New Years day.

Two of my favorite things my parents got me include:

These fun colored nesting bowls. I love them and have been wanting them for a while!



This super functional carousel organizer that I have used to organize all of our office supplies.

I also got a beautiful serving bowl as well as some other things for the kitchen. JP got tons of tools from my Dad. My Dad is glad he finally has a boy around to share in his love for all things tools and cars!