A Month of Christmas!

Our Christmas festivities started on December 5th with the annual Ginger Bread House making in Lehi.  They all turned out awesome, as usual:

Tiff & Nea (With help from their parents...)

Rick & Marnae's Great Pyramid (Complete with task masters and food storage...)

Tyler and his Snowed-In house

Nikki & Brooke and the Lincoln Memorial

Jared

Alex

The Folks

Us and our Crib (Rick told us to bring our A-Game, and baby was no excuse... this is what resulted...)

P.S.  Please ignore the chubby pregnant cheeks...

The next weekend we had a Christmas Dinner with a few friends:

 

A Christofferson Cousin Party:

(Thanks Torie for the picture!)

And Jeff's work Christmas Party at Thanksgiving Point, (which we didn't end up with any pictures from.)

I love Christmas parties, the holiday season, and the excitement that just floats in the air during this time of year.  I wish I could explain just how much I love it, but it's so hard to put into words!

In between all our festivities we spent our time trying to get our house presentable and as much put together as possible before Christmas came, as my family decided to come down for Christmas!  They hadn't seen our house yet, and I have a growing belly that probably wouldn't have been super fun to travel with, so they came down instead of us going to Boise this year.

My parents came down on the 21st, and my brothers made it down on the 23rd when Nate got off work.  Once my parents got here our tree looked much more ready for Christmas, (especially since Jeff and I hadn't even wrapped our presents yet... slackers...) 

(And cute Bo curled up on the floor... now all we need is a fireplace...) 

The weekend before they came it snowed and we got DUMPED on! We weren't expecting a big storm, but by Tuesday morning we had a foot and a half on the ground, which Jeff shoveled three times, after he and our neighbor Ty got me unstuck at the end of our driveway!  Luckily parts of the street were plowed and some cars had already made tracks to the main roads or I don't know if I would've made it out of the neighborhood!  (Some people at work didn't make it out of theirs...)

Luckily, it was a mostly southern Utah storm, and my parents had clear roads through Idaho and northern Utah.  They said there was no snow on the ground in Ogden when they came through!  Amazing!  They made it Tuesday night without any complications!  And even though we had a few warmer days following the storm, we still had a white Christmas!  

This picture was actually taken Monday night before we got dumped on, but we still had a decent amount left for a white Christmas!  : ) 

During the time before the boys got here, we had fun showing my parents around our house, chatting and catching up, and making empanadas:

The boys surprised us by getting here Thursday night around 9pm instead of midnight like we thought!  And they immediately discovered our snow throwers and started a mini war which then turned into fetch for Bo:

I wish I had pictures or video footage of Bo trying to get the snowballs... He would jump in the air and try to catch them but they'd just splat in his face.  Others he'd try to find by burying his face in the snow where it landed.  It was hilarious...

  Some of my family's Christmas traditions include warm fresh cinnamon rolls Christmas morning (prepared the day before):

And a fun finger food meal Christmas Eve:

Having a family of "grown-up" kids means we didn't wake up till after 9:30am Christmas morning, and it was wonderful!  ;)  We really enjoyed our first Christmas in our new house, in our "cozy" (not to be confused with crowded) living room!  

I got the idea from my cousin Brea and her 5 O'Clock Shadow beards business, and made my brothers these beards for snowboarding for Christmas:

And they've already tried them out!  

Thank you family for making the trip down here, and Mom and Dad for all the fun food and ideas and wanting to spend time with us in our new home.  We loved having you here!