Wow, can you believe that Christmas is passed and the New Year is upon us! Well, I hope everyone had an enjoyable and relaxing Christmas Eve and Christmas morning. This time of year can be a little tough and stressful because of driving and trying to coordinate every piece of the holiday. I know that it was a little exhausting for us but really amazing and different since it was our first Christmas Married. Here’s a little Christmas recap from my family to you!
Last year I did my best to get the basics for decorating because they get really expensive, I’m happy to say that I actually didn’t have to buy much other than a new Christmas Tree and my mom gave me a bunch of decorations that she wasn’t using anymore. I put up the tree, garland and attempted to make the apartment look Christmas-y, excuse the mess in the photos and the fact that some aren’t really blog-worthy. I took them for my mom! After all the photos of my apartment I’ll give you more of a recap of our travels and time with family.
Now that you’ve seen enough of my apartment I can get into what we actually did for the holidays. I left for Christmas before Conor did, he had to work until Christmas Eve day so I decided to drive him to work three days before Christmas Eve and my sister then picked me up from his hospital. The whole night before I was a mess finishing up my last final, finishing gifts and I for some reason thought I’d be able to make cookies. I ended up just making the dough and bringing it with me. When I got home I actually went straight into baking my sugar cookies. I rolled it all out, cut out the shapes and baked until 10pm. It was really nice because both my grandmas were there and we got to have wine while catching up and them watching me bake. The next day I woke up at 8:30am and started decorating cookies! So I never made my royal icing before or “flood” icing and did not realize that this would literally take forever to do. I essentially spent the whole day doing these cookies and ultimately they didn’t get eaten because there were so many,
Conor ended up arriving late the night before Christmas Eve and we stayed up for a little while finishing a few gifts and just chatting. The following morning I let Conor sleep in since he works such long shifts and I started helping my mom and grandmas start prepping for Christmas Eve. Around noon, my two Aunts came to visit and we caught up and all exchanged gifts, sadly they had to leave early but they have other family to visit. We then had some dinner and exchanged gifts. Conor and I packed up and started packing the car when my baby brother who isn’t really a baby anymore, he’s 11! Realized that we didn’t make reindeer food or put out Santa’s Cookies. So we quickly put on the NORAD Santa tracker to make sure Santa wasn’t close yet, grabbed everything from the cupboards and started making the reindeer food. If you didn’t know, all the ingredients help the reindeer fly fast onto the next houses. We tossed it outside, put out milk and cookies, said our goodbyes and Conor and I were off to Long Island to visit his family.
I think we arrived close to 1:30 in the morning at his parents home, the ride was long but we always have awesome conversations in car rides. We quickly went to bed and we woke up a little later than what we wanted to but we were so tired from traveling. I got to have an awesome Long Island bagel and cream cheese for breakfast and if you haven’t had one you have no idea what you’re missing. Since moving out of Long Island I’ve been seriously homesick over the bagels, pizza and deli’s. After breakfast we unwrapped gifts and spent the rest of the day just chatting and spending time together. We then had a beautiful homamade dinner, took a quick nap and packed up our things to drive home. Conor wasn’t feeling too great so we left much later than when we wanted to so we got back to Philadelphia around 1am again. The following day, Conor had to go to work and I went back to my parents because apparently Santa wasn’t sure where Conor and I were going to be and left our gifts at my parents home.
I hope you all enjoyed Christmas!