Hectic Holidays

With the hustle and bustle of the Holidays I've gotten behind in my blog posts. Big surprise. Here is our Christmas season in photos. 

On December 9th we drove to Winona to pick up Brian.  He had a big paper due, so we went later in the day.  We hit Lake City and Lake Pepin just in time to see the moon rising over the lake.  A couple of quick pictures and we were on our way again.  Having Brian home for the holidays has been a treat!

When I run out of ideas of what to take my picture of the day of, I look for Christmas decorations.  This is one of many horse ornaments on our tree.

After 4 years of not playing, Billy has decided to play basketball again this winter.  It's in-house ball, they call it "Swag Ball".  Their team is pretty good so far.  It helps to have at least 3 boys in the 6'4" range.  Billy is #34 on the left.  His shooting is rusty, but he's the rebound king....or so I'm told.  I'm just glad that he's got something to keep him busy in the winter.

Back to decorations.  A white bouquet with Christmas light bokeh in the background.

Another rocking horse on my tree.  The days are short in Minnesota this time of year.

Eric's birthday was December 13th, his parents came down and we celebrated his day on the 14th...then headed off to a basketball game.  Billy's playing gives us something to do in the winter too.

 I had seen a cool experiment on Facebook to try with zoom lens.  Tripod, sloooooww shutter speed and zooming out while the shutter is open can give you results like this.  I posted it on facebook and one of my friends said that it looked like the angel was blasting off!

 Back to the decorations.  A rocking horse from 1984...one of the early ones in the collection.

This is one of my little reindeer candles....in the middle of a gloomy day.  It's a welcome event when the days slowly start getting longer.

A "swag ball" picture of Billy shooting a free throw....taken with my camera phone.  Some days I just don't feel like being that mom with the camera.  Basketball pictures are tough though, even harder with a cell phone.  Maybe I should just not worry about being the camera mom.

Part of my snow village.  There are a lot of horses in the village.  Imagine that.  I've been tempted to take a sharpie and fill in some of those beady little eyes on the figurines, but I'm not brave enough.  Why do they make them with such small eyes?  Some of them are creepy looking to me.

I thought I'd share a picture of a typical evening before Christmas around here.  Brian on his laptop, Eric wrapping gifts in front of the TV...usually with the cat sitting on the table keeping an eye on things.  Eric isn't crabby about the wrapping, he's just concentrating.  I do most of the shopping and neatly boxing things up, he does a lot of the wrapping while I'm doing other stuff.  It works for us.

I took some time and baked a few kinds of cookies this year.  These are my favorites, peanut butter blossoms....yum! 

I have made gift jars for my aunts and uncles for a lot of years.  This year I made Holiday M & M Oatmeal bars.  I mixed up a batch for us too...yum again!

We went to my mom's house on December 23rd.  This is her little tree in her kitchen.  Little white lights with red decorations...it is very cute.

There was snow at my mom's, a nice change from here.  I took this picture of frost on a weed in the horse pasture on Christmas Eve morning.  We spent a wonderfully relaxing day with my mom, my brother and his son.  A house filled with love, just as it should be.

 Christmas Day we were at Eric's parents house.  After church we opened gifts and then ate the Christmas feast.  Billy mashed the potatoes, here is a picture of his cousin Becca holding the pot while Billy scoops the potatoes into the serving bowl.  They were cute working together.

We had a family picture taken in the music room.  The boys clean up pretty good...all of them.  It was a wonderful day to celebrate the reason of the season.

We came home Christmas night to open gifts here.  I miss the days when the boys were little and in awe of the day, but I'm loving these days where both boys are home and laughing and just enjoying time together.  Life is good.

Here are some lights on our backyard fence.  It was 52 degrees the day after Christmas.  Unheard of around here.  A 75 year old temperature record was broken.  Crazy.

And last but not least, another decoration.  A new shepherd, or maybe he's a goat herder, for my Willow Tree Nativity set from Eric.  I like it!



Christmas is behind us, the new year is quickly coming...I hope that you've had a wonderful Holiday and are making some fun plans for the New Year.  2012...it's going to be a good one!  Thanks for stopping by.