Christmas - Part 1

We had the requisite multiple Christmases this year. Our "first" Christmas was on Christmas Eve with Jennifer, Jason, Ben and Luke coming over that evening for stockings, dinner and gifts. I made up a huge batch of Beef Stroganoff, fresh fruit salad, broccoli and hot rolls. My friend, Marilyn, had come over to the house in Katy the previous week and given me a much appreciated tutorial on how to make her DELICIOUS yeast rolls - oh my, they were good. Earlier on Christmas Eve I made a double batch so we'd have cinnamon rolls for Christmas morning and rolls for both Christmas Eve and Christmas Dinner. She "done good" because I was able to remember and they were super delicious if I do say so myself.

I am nothing if not humble.

So back to the recap. We'd started the day with overcast skies and mid-to-upper 30's temps. I was in the shower getting ready when Mike comes in and says, "You're not going to believe it but it's snowing outside. Not much but the flurries are nice." We still needed to run a few more errands so we loaded up the car with Jen, Ben and Luke tagging along and headed out. The flurries by now had turned into bonafide snowfall and it was started to get thick and heavy but with a very gusty wind causing it to sting our faces when facing the wind. Visibility was beginning to be low and we decided to get some lunch, meeting Jason there on his way home early from work, and then get home. Good thing we did as it really got hard to travel by mid-afternoon. Pools of water iced over fairly soon after dusk making it dangerous to go very far. Fortunately, Jen and Jason's home is just around the corner from our place so they slipped and slid over. I had forgotten a grocery item so Jason went to get some from their house. He was gone a LONG time we finally called to find out it had taken him 20 minutes to get the car into the garage without sliding back into the street. He finally got it in and decided to get the food item I needed and WALK over. That was some serious weather and just the day before it was in the 60s! And did I get a photo of it? Of course not!

We ate dinner and then got down to the serious business of opening gifts. Ben was able, for the first time, to read some of the tags making him the perfect elf. I'll let the photos tell the rest of the story. Next post I'll try to do Part II - Christmas Day with Tim's family and Chris' family.