Good Times, Merry Times!

Our Christmas lights. I miss all the lights. They made driving at night much cheerier!

I first have to say, I have the best hubby ever! I then have to say, he really wants me to work on a blog entry. And since it's so hard to say no to his sweet face, here I am! I finally got my photos downloaded from our new digital camera. It seems to work pretty well :) Every other one I've had was a Sony, but this is a Canon. So far so good.

Christmas was exciting and fun! My parents arrived on Christmas Day and headed back home on New Year’s Day. We loved having them here! A full house is always so wonderful on holidays. Our home felt warm and replete with love and joy. Isn't that the way a home should always feel?

Oh the joy of taking the remote in hand!

Now some of you may say that you can't feel replete with love and joy until you have a large screen television in front of your sofa. It's quite possible that my dear husband finds himself in that camp. So, on Black Friday we headed out to our favorite (and pretty much our only) appliance store and grabbed a good deal on an LG 42" plasma tv.


I wouldn't let Tony put it up until Christmas Day. While Bethany drove to the airport to pick up the parents, Tony and David put their free time to work and got the tv set up. We are so grateul for David who knows a lot about electronics! He's helped us out way more than once!

Gigi spent some time with random toys and old tablecloths as you see here. She really has an amazing imagination and can create fun out of the weirdest things. Gotta love two-year-olds!

Here is the finished product! It really is a beautiful thing. And I, for one, am so glad we don't have to keep talking about tv's and researching tv's and stopping by the tv section in every store we go to :) Yea!!

The sister missionaries were able to make it to Christmas dinner with us! It was fun to pull out our new smaller kitchen table and set things up nice and pretty for a big group. I wanted to have a meal that reminded me of my roots, and it was a big hit! Honeybaked Ham (only stood in line for 30 minutes or less) and funeral potatoes. Yum! Often on holidays we make meals that are more Italian in tradition, which is always yummy, but sometimes you want something that reminds you of your growing-up years. Tony was a little apprehensive when he heard my menu ideas, but I think he loved it as much as anyone! We had homemade cheesecake for dessert. Fantastic and so easy!

Gigi was so excited to see Uncle Tony open the present from her family!

The sisters had to leave to make their curfew, and after they left we opened presents! Mostly we opened the ones under our tree and then went to Bethany and David's the following day to open their presents. I won't list everything, but let's just say that Santa hit our house hard. It was really fun to have everyone there together on such a special day.